unpolished jade

Moving Up and Out

2008-12-24T14:12:00.001-05:00

Hi everyone--

Unpolished Jade has now moved to Wordpress (much easier to use than Blogger's setup). The new page is here. Check it out!

Does Analects 12.1 Really Say Anything About Human Nature?

2008-12-02T14:06:00.007-05:00

Bryan Van Norden seems to suggest (on p. 127 in his "Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy") that Analects 12.1 presents us with a view of human nature relatively close to Xunzi's. Although Van Norden is careful to make clear that he thinks there is no worked out conception of human nature in the Analects, he does seem to think that 12.1 offers some hint that Confucius thought of humans as naturally "resistant to virtue" in something like the way Xunzi did. Although I agree with Van Norden that there is no worked out view of human nature in the Analects, and that what we can glean from the Analects seems to make Confucius closer to Xunzi on what we ought to expect from humans in general (even aside from the issue of xing 性), 12.1 doesn't seem to me to suggest any particular view of human nature. The key to this reading, I think, is the term ji 己. If we read it as simply "oneself", then it does seem to suggest a Xunzian view of human nature. But I think there is reason (which I've been attempting to polish up arguments for in the dissertation) to see ji in 12.1 not as referring to the self, but instead as referring to certain features of oneself. Zhu Xi suggests that the right way to read ji in 12.1 is as something like "selfish desires" (The jizhu commentary on the line of 12.1 in question reads: 己謂身之私欲...). I don't take quite this line, but something relatively close. "socially non-contextualized individual" might be closer to my own reading. I take ji as representing oneself as isolated individual, which is the owner of desires and other features that can belong uniquely to individuals. I take this isolated individual, however, as something less than a full person, because it is not socially contextualized. Then, the issue becomes what human nature attaches to: the isolated individual (ji) or the properly formed person (ren人)? The Analects, although it does I think make this distinction, has no answer about which of these two human nature is involved with. There are some really difficult issues surrounding this, which I've not sufficiently thought through yet. What is clear, however, is that if ji is correctly read in either my way or Zhu Xi's "selfish desire" way, then turning away from one's ji is necessary for moral development, but there is no hint as to whether humans naturally are concerned with this ji instead of with something else. What is clear from 12.1 is that either 1) people focusing on ji to the detriment of ritual was a pressing problem among Confucius' contemporaries--because if it were not, there would be no reason to mention it in giving an answer to how one achieves ren 仁.; 2) paying undue attention to one's ji was a potential or actual problem of Yan Hui's , as the response (克己復禮爲仁 "Turning away from ji and returning/adhering to ritual is ren") was given by Confucius in answer to Yan Hui's question about ren 仁 (Yan Hui was a great student, but he wasn't perfect, after all); or 3) both 1 and 2 are true. Regardless of whether 1,2, or 3 is true, however, 12.1 then does not suggest any particular view of human nature, without further information such as "not only do people these days pay too much attention to ji, but humans in general have a natural tendency to do so." 1,2,or 3 could be true, that is, due to corrupting influences in the society which got in the way (as Mencius suggested) of human nature. Any thoughts?

Dissertation Hell!

2008-10-06T12:06:00.004-04:00

I'm in it.

Wow--two months since I've posted anything here at UPJ! That's just sad. I'm going to have to get back to neglecting this dissertation and step things up a bit! Luckily, since I've got a bit of material from the dissertation that might not make it into the final work, I may air some of that stuff out here in the days to come, to get your thoughts about this stuff. Confucius and Aristotle stuff mainly, but a few interesting things concerning the Yangist/Proto-Daoist confrontations in Analects 18 (as I've blogged on a little bit before). Or whatever else I decide to throw out there...

Analects 2.3--Shame, Good Government, and Dao (Part Two)

2008-08-11T11:33:00.014-04:00

Well, it's been a while since I posted part one of this two-part post on Analects 2.3, and there have been lots of excellent comments on both my translation and interpretation of 2.3 from part one. So, in what's becoming an outrageously long multi part post on 2.3, I'm going to expand this post into a few more parts, to discuss both the rest of the issues I promised I'd say something about in part one, and also to spend a little more time making the case for a situationist reading of 2.3. I'll also say some more things about my translation choices, as there were a couple of excellent comments on this also. This stuff becomes more complicated as I work through it, which is part of the reason it's taken so long to get new posts up. I'll try to be better with finishing this series on 2.3 off in a timely fashion, though.

Anyway: in this second part, I'll be discussing

1) Ambivalence about zheng

Part of what I think is going on in 2.3 is a denial that zheng is really such a great thing after all. This is markedly different than what we see in Book 12 and 13, which may have been written earlier than Book 2. This strikes me as a movement away from a positive view of zheng. In particular, I'm thinking here of 12.7, 12.11, 12.17, 13.1, 13.2 as passages which seem to give a highly positive view of zheng, and link it with the kind of shame and standard that 2.3 claims flows from using de as a way to dao zhi (either thought of as guiding the people or establishing dao in the state--though I'm not so sure the two renderings differ as far as the point made--more on that below).

The above passages from Book 12 and 13 generally take the form of a student asking a question about zheng, and the master answering in a way suggesting that various virtues are part of zheng, and are required for it. This is the reason I translate it as 'proper governance' rather than just 'system of government', or something like that. The normative element seems built into the concept, in the way it's used in 12 and 13 (in most places). One might argue that the use in 2.3 is simply an older type of use, and there is no normative element contained in this, but that the zheng passages from 12 and 13 reflect changed understandings of zheng in which the normative element was increasingly built in, similar to the Confucian transformation of the noble title junzi. Alternatively, one could argue that zheng is used in a non-normative sense in 2.3 and the passages from Book 12 and 13, and it is just the context in the 12 and 13 passages that adds the normativity to the discussion. This would be to claim that 問政 (wen zheng "asking about governance") has implicitly a normative dimension that zheng by itself does not, so that the wen here is doing the work--when one asks about a certain activity, he is asking "how ought one perform this activity."

There are a couple of reasons I want to avoid this. First, it doesn't seem to be the case that wen is normatively loaded in this way in many of its uses in the Analects, where it looks to be more of a neutral "inquiring into". Second, some of the responses Confucius gives seem to suggest that he is thinking about zheng in certain passages as including the normative element. In 12.17, for example, in response to a question from Ji Kangzi about zheng, 問政 again, Confucius says:

政者，正也。子帥以正，孰敢不正？ Those who govern promote proper action. If you engage in promotion of proper action, who will dare to not to act properly?

[This is a tough passage to translate, and really requires highly interpretative translation. Some alternative translations might take the first two uses of zheng as the same as the final, so that "acting properly" is what the person who governs does, rather than "promoting proper action". Some read this as connected to the "rectification of names" bit. I don't really buy that, because the final zheng here would not make sense. Also, it would just be too easy to say zheng ming instead of zheng, and I can't see any pedagogical reason Confucius would have avoided using ming here if he really meant to talk about the rectification of names. Zheng has too commonly used a sense to be linked with zheng ming without strong evidence. And in the context, taking zheng in its more common sense fits, and seems to make for a reading of the passage keeping with other things the Analects says about government. Certainly, 13.3 is relevant in connection to this passage, but I think it's a reach to take them as discussing the same thing.]

In 12.7 it looks to me like zheng is meant to include the normative element. Governing badly would not be an example of zheng. Although not all the uses seem to contain the normative element, for example 13.6. Another place we see a use of zheng clearly without the normative element is 2.1, which talks of "using virtue to govern" (為政以德). See--that pesky Book 2 messing things up again! See also 12.19, where "wei zheng" is used: 子為政，焉用殺?

Anyway--back to the main point here--in 2.3 we see that zheng is represented as inferior to de as a way to "establish dao" (or, alternatively, "guide the people/state"). The suggestion is that zheng is inferior because it does not instill the people with the right internal guide or standard of action. As I read the Analects, this standard of shame works as a way of keeping people in line and focused on the right way without the constant attention of the ruler, "ordering themselves", as some translations of 2.3 have it. The reason I translate the ge here as 'standard', then, is I take it to refer to a mechanism by which the people become orderly spontaneously and of their own volition, not just the fact of their doing so. It is connected to the chi, "shame", that is mentioned just before it. The people will have shame, and it is this shame that serves as the standard by which they see what is right and wrong, and align themselves accordingly. Without this shame, they cannot be said to have a knowledge of right and wrong. The ruler has given them no standard for judging it. (Fingarette's book has an excellent discussion on shame in the Analects, by the way, and Cua also discussed this in his article "The Ethical Significance of Shame"). I know, you may be thinking "that ruler giving a standard stuff sounds more like Xunzi than the Analects". If so, then you've discovered my Xunzi-bias on Analects interpretation. I generally see Xunzi as pretty close to the thought of the Analects, certainly closer than Mencius is (though that's an argument for another day).

So, back to the negativity about zheng bit. Given that, in passages like 12.17, zheng is equated with proper conduct, and in the Book 12 and 13 passages in general, lots of other goodies are offered as included in zheng, including "the trust of the people" 民信 (12.7)--a big one, and relevant to 2.3, which might be read as claiming that the trust of the people comes with de, not with zheng, 2.3 seems a bit down on zheng in comparison. In the estimation of the Confucius of 2.3, it's not quite hitting the mark. And this seems like a movement from the views of Confucius on zheng in Books 12 and 13.

Anyway--just some initial thoughts about it, refined a little bit since last time I thought about this, but still really rough, and likely problematic.

Cheng Shude: An Early Birthday Gift, and Taking A Stand...

2008-07-28T20:17:00.004-04:00

So... I realize that part 2 of the post on Analects 2.3 is due--and it's on its way, trust me. Part of the reason I didn't post the rest of the 2.3 interpretation today was because I just received, via Interlibrary Loan through UConn's library, a copy of Cheng Shude's 論語集釋 (Lunyu jishi), a collection of commentaries on the Analects, which is absolutely massive, and which I want to glance at to get some commentary on 2.3. Cheng, an early 20th century scholar, collected a whole boatload of traditional commentaries on the Analects, and collected them together in this work--which is, of course, why it's called the jishi ("collected explanations"). I just got the copy today, and it's awesome. It contains both the He Yan commentaries and the Zhu Xi, and a whole lot more.

There are only a couple of problems--1) I've only been able to get my hands on the first volume of this edition, which only covers up to Book 12 of the Analects. To give you some sense of how much commentary is here, this volume runs to 764 pages. And this isn't a large-print, double spaced, one inch margins type deal. No!--764 pages of tiny print Chinese characters, where each page is probably equivalent to about four of the same content in English. Which brings me to problem 2) the characters are so small, I either have to put my face all the way to the book and still squint to see them, or invest in a magnifying glass. They're so small that the ink used to print the thing in many places runs together because a character has too many strokes, making it look like a jumbled mess or a pure ink blot, so sometimes you can only figure out what the character is from the context. For example, I had to guess there's a 焉 at the end of one line of commentary, because 馬, 為, and the like wouldn't have really made any sense... Unfortunately, not all the ink blots are this easy to figure out. Some of them leave me scratching my head.

Anyway, regardless of the problems, the collection rules, and I'll be sad when I have to send it back to the Brown University library. I think I'll just buy a copy of this one somewhere--if I can find it. I look at this as an early birthday gift (albeit a temporary one).

Speaking of birthday--tomorrow (Tuesday) is my 30th birthday. I thought I'd mention that because (as I mentioned to Chris in a conversation today), if I plan on modeling myself after Confucius, I ought to now be "taking a stand" (立 li). I guess I'm falling a little short on that one, though--I don't know how much of a stand one can take while hidden away in library offices and coffee shops working on a dissertation on Confucian ethics. Oh well.

More to come soon (if I don't lose my mind trying to read microscopic characters)!

Analects 2.3--Shame, Good Government, and Dao (Part One)

2008-07-23T17:17:00.013-04:00

Part of the reason I want to start out with this passage is because I find it extremely rich, and possibly as offering a view which looks at 政 zheng ("proper governance") more skeptically than do earlier (date wise) passages in Book 12. Lots of other interesting stuff here as well. Anyway, on with the passage!

Analects 2.3 子曰：“道之以政，齊之以刑，民免而無恥；道之以德，齊之以禮，有恥且格

Translation: The master said, "Using proper governance to establish dao, using a penal code to establish order, the folk will escape (punishment) but will have no guiding sense of shame. Using virtue (de) to establish dao, using ritual (li) to establish order, there will be a guiding sense of shame and also a standard (ge)."

Okay. So I won't be using the commentaries on this post, because I'm still waiting for my interlibrary loan copies of the ones I've ordered. But when my volumes come in, I may look back to this passage to try to pull some more out of it.

For now, then, I'll be content in giving my own interpretation of this passage, and pointing out some keys to what I think is going on here. First, let me mention that I take this passage to be "situationist-friendly", if not muscular evidence itself that the Analects presents us with a situationist ethics. I think the latter claim would be extremely implausible and there's no argument that could support it, especially when we consider that situationist ethics such as that advocated by John Doris and Gilbert Harman appear to me very dependent on what they conceive of as Aristotelian virtue ethics--that is, their situationist ethics is mainly negatively formulated, arguing that human behavior is not dependent on global character traits in the way (they claim) virtue ethicists require, and that situation has a larger role to play in causing certain types of behavior than virtue ethicists can allow. This negative point, however, doesn't really tell us anything about how a situationist ethical theory would be laid out--fleshing out such a theory would require some explanation of what situations are, their link to psychological and physiological mechanisms by which they effect behavior, and how situations can be manipulated so as to result in right action, or goodness of 'local' character, or whatever. Part of the difficulty I have with the philosophical literature on situationism is that the positive project seems sparse. So, my reading of Confucius and Xunzi as "situationists" is basically to read them as agreeing with Doris and Harman that there are generally no cross-situationally stable robust character traits (in normal people), and that ethical cultivation depends more on putting oneself in the right environment than attending to reasons for action, etc.

So, with that out of the way, I'll try to explain three things in these two posts, briefly: 1) why I take 2.3 as situationist (even though I take Book 2 in general to be both later--see Brooks and Brooks--and closer to Mencius than the later books of the Analects), 2) how I see an ambivalence about zheng here that doesn't exist in the Book 12 passages, 3) my translation of 格 ge as 'standard' and how this connects to point 1. Here in Part One of this post on 2.3 I will deal with point 1 above, and will discuss 2 and 3 in Part Two (there's just too damn much to say about this stuff...)

1) 2.3 sets up an opposition between using zheng and xing (proper governance and a penal code) to establish dao and order and using de and li to do this same thing. What makes the difference between the two ways of establishing dao and order is that one way creates a guiding sense of shame (恥 chi) [I'll leave the ge until later], and one does not, but in both cases there can be adherence to the law, or a certain type of order. However, if we consider what is operative in the case in which the people gain a guiding internal measure (chi), it seems like of the two ways, following li simply creates in one (members of the 民 min) the kinds of feelings that are appropriate to keep one ordered and following dao (that is, the feeling of shame). This feeling is generated simply through the following of the li. Depending on how we construe li here, this is a bold claim. If li is merely very specific practices divorced from one's psychological state then the claim is strong. If li, however, includes an affective element, so that one does not count as being engaged in li if one does not have the correct attitude and emotions, then the claim that chi (guiding sense of shame) is generated by following li seems close to trivial, since it seems plausible that if certain attitudes and emotions are required for li then chi is one of these. So this leads me to think that 2.3 is claiming that by performing certain physical actions we can come to gain a particular psychological state (much like the claim that my mood will become better if I simply force myself to smile--a claim which I take it has some empirical evidence to back it up).

On the other hand, a penal code (刑 xing, also translatable as simply 'punishment') has to do more with negative actions and violations than with positive action. A penal code gives us a list of things we are not allowed to do and specifies punishments if we do these things. It does not, however, specify how we ought to perform all the actions for which there can be no punishment, for practical reasons. We could, one might argue, make a penal code just as detailed as the li, by basically codifying the li and listing various punishments for failure to adhere to li in any given circumstance. There are (at least) two problems with xing, however. First--law enforcement has limited scope. There could be no way one could possibly punish infringements of something as broad as the li, which pertain to every situation in one's life. Second, and more importantly, offering punishments for failure to adhere to li assumes that such adherence is something that people would just as well not have--the reason behind their adherence on this model is that they will avoid punishment, and this is their only motivation. For this reason, the people will lack important psychological states (such as chi) which are both guiding, allowing one to use less energy in governing (the people will order themselves, the ruler will be a "pole star", leading in a kind of wu wei fashion), and necessary to ensure that dao is realized in the state.

So how does a ruler use li to order the people? By adhering to li himself, of course. Connecting this with the points of the above two paragraphs, we can see that the reason a ruler has to resort to a penal code is that he is not himself adhering to li--because if he were, the people would adhere to li as well, using the ruler as a model for action. In following the laws established by the ruler and having no shame, the people would also be following the actions of the ruler, in neglecting li. Confucius seems to hold that both the actions and the psychology of the people are effected by the actions and psychology of the ruler. There is almost a simple mimicking relationship like that between a child and a parent operative here. The people look up to the ruler and fashion themselves after the way he is, just like a child looks up to a parent and fashions him or herself after the way the parent is. Often (most often, perhaps), this happens without our even knowing it. We simply catch ourselves acting, speaking, and thinking even in ways characteristic of our parents, teachers, or culture. (By the way Joel Kupperman has a great article on this--"Tradition and Community in the Formation of Character and Self", and I've had some good conversations with Chris about this for the past couple of weeks).

If this is part of what is behind 2.3, it strikes me as very friendly to situationism. Part of the reason for this is that, in essence, it is saying that the people (min) can be made to have very different behaviors, even very different psychological states (!) simply by variation in the actions of the ruler. Notice that we are now not talking about children, who are not fully formed either psychologically or physiologically, but the min, the people, which is made up of fully formed adults. On the globalist notion of character Doris and Harman attack, characteristic responses indicative of character should be expected to obtain across a variety of situations. The responses of the min are not so, however. It's not completely clear what to take from this, though. It could be that Confucius considers the members of the min to lack character in a robust globalist sense, while he thinks that there is such thing as this type of character, obtaining only in sages and the high level junzi (a good question to ask here is whether a junzi who is a low ranking official counts as a member of the min--which is why I'm thrilled Chris is working on a paper on the issue of figuring out what the min is). It could, on the other hand, mean that Confucius thinks that no one has character of the type in question, and is not disparaging the min. What seems clear, though, is that for most people, what goes on in the palace has a larger impact on their behavior and psychological states than does any character trait of their own.

Anyway--this was a particularly wandering and disorganized post, mostly because I thought of some new things as I wrote it. Hope it makes some kind of sense. But hey, that's why I called this thing "Unpolished Jade" in the first place. Part two coming up.

Prepare To Be Beaten, Dead Horse!

2008-07-22T19:53:00.005-04:00

So I've been somewhat reticent lately, and there have been a couple of good reasons for this--most important, though, is the simple reason that I haven't really had anything very interesting to say recently. This is mostly because the dissertation is using up most of my creative energy, and given that I've blogged on many of the topics covered in the dissertation, I don't want to keep covering the same thing over and over (especially because, among other things, blogging is a way to avoid said dissertation).

Anyway--looking back over the heap of past blog posts here at "Unpolished Jade", I realized there was a project I was involved in some time ago which I'd completely forgotten about, and which I think it's about time to resurrect. I had been giving translations and interpretations of passages from the Analects. Now, in renewing this project, I think I will take a slightly different approach. Namely, instead of simply going through the Analects passage by passage (this can get kinda tedious, especially when dealing with passages like the Book 10 "if the mats weren't properly positioned, he wouldn't sit" type of thing), I will focus on what I take to be interesting or important passages from the Analects (I know, I know--they're all interesting and important...). Also, I will try to integrate (in a way I didn't before) some of the traditional commentaries in my discussions on the passages. Of course, I will do this in a different way than Slingerland does it in his translation of the Analects--I will mention them in order to critically engage with them, rather than as ways to explain the text. I was converted about a year or so ago to the view that the traditional commentaries are indispensable for understanding the Analects, even if mainly because many of the main interpretive options are descended from views outlined in the commentaries. So I'll probably be wrestling with the Analects and some commentary, especially He Yan's 論語集解 (Lunyu jijie) and Zhu Xi's 論語集住 (Lunyu jizhu), along with other Zhu works, because I think Zhu Xi's impact on early Confucian interpretation was massive, and, maybe, underestimated by some philosophers, or at least not dealt with as often as I'd like. I haven't completely lost my marbles and bought into the Neo-Confucian readings of the Analects, however, so expect resistance on this front.

One final matter--if there are any Analects passages any readers of "Unpolished Jade" are interested in, send them along, and I'll give my best shot at some interpretation. This blog is nothing if not a springboard for further thoughts. I have my pet passages (which I'll be sure to get in), and I'm sure everyone who reads this blog has their own as well. So let's get Confucianizing! I think I'll deal with 2.3 first--expect something on this in the next day or so. A nice passage to begin with, I think, given my interest in Confucius and behavioral situationism.

Phronimos, We Hardly Knew Ye

2008-06-28T10:03:00.004-04:00

On Chris Panza's blog a week or so ago, Aristotle's ethics came up during a discussion on Confucius and possible distinctions within the concept of ren or that of the junzi (check it out). This got me to thinking about Aristotle and a problem I took him to solve in the Nicomachean Ethics by way of his distinction between natural virtue and full virtue—namely, the problem of how a person with a particular “virtue” (I use the scare quotes here to mark the ambiguity of the term 'virtue' here) could ever perform a non-virtuous action, or one not in keeping with that virtue, in unguarded moments, etc. Here's what I say about Aristotle in a comment to the post:

He considers cases in which one has a disposition to act a certain way, but external forces keep one from performing the acts one intends to, or other considerations (for example, one act is even more virtuous than another) get in the way.

If I remember correctly, he goes so far as to say that if a person is thwarted in this way from performing virtuous action very often, then the disposition that person has toward this action does not count as a virtue. He is able to maintain this (although it’s not explicit, but has to be interpreted) due to his distinction between “natural virtue” and “full virtue”.

So, after looking back through the NE after my move back to Connecticut, I noticed that Aristotle never actually explicitly says anything that exciting, but I think we can construct this interpretation of what Aristotle does say in various passages in the NE. I'd simply been reading Aristotle this way so long that I thought he said it outright. Anyway, here's some argument:

The key passage for the natural virtue/full virtue distinction is NE 1144b1-1145a6. Here he explains that the difference between natural virtue and full virtue is phronesis, possession of which unifies the virtues and makes a natural disposition a full virtue. The phronimos of necessity possesses all the virtues together. One might possess some natural virtues without others, however. These natural virtues seem from this passage to simply be the same thing as the full virtues without the unity to other virtues, without rationality leading them, or without requiring successful virtuous acts connected with the naturally virtuous disposition one has “of nature” (something one's born with, perhaps).

If we then consider what Aristotle says about external goods and their relation to eudaimonia, in Book I in NE 1098b32-1099a5 and NE 1099a32-b8, we can begin to see how the connection is made. It's worth the space here to quote one of the above passages fully (Ross/Urmson translation):

(NE 1099a32-b8) “...it [happiness] needs the external goods as well; for it is impossible, or not easy, to do noble acts without the proper equipment. In many actions we use friends and riches and political power as instruments; and there are some things the lack of which takes the lustre from blessednes, as good birth, satisfactory children, beauty; for the man who is very ugly in appearance or ill-born or solitary and childless is hardly happy, and perhaps a man would be still less so if he had thoroughly bad children or friends or had lost good children or friends by death. As we said, then, happiness seems to need this sort of prosperity in addition; for which reason some identify happiness with good fortune, though others identify it with excellence.”

Keeping this in mind, let's return to virtue. For the cultivation of the virtues, it is necessary to practice virtuous acts, as Aristotle explains at NE 1103a26-b2:

“...of all the things that come to us by nature we first aquire the potentiality and later exhibit the activity [...] but excellences we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”

Thus, one might have “natural virtue” in the sense of having a disposition toward generosity, etc., but if they are unable (for whatever reason) to practice generous acts, they cannot gain the full virtue of generosity. Aristotle can sensibly maintain this by employing the distinction between natural virtue and full virtue, although he doesn't mention this distinction until much later in the NE. One may not have a particular virtue (although one does have a disposition toward it) simply because one does not have the opportunity to practice acts connected with the disposition—for example, a completely poor person may have a disposition toward generosity, but without the opportunity to transform this disposition (a mere natural virtue) into a full virtue through practice (which seems that it must be connected to the habituation to reasons), the poor person cannot be generous in the full-blown sense. The opportunity spoken of here is also related to the need for external goods mentioned above in NE 1098b32-1099a5 and NE 1099a32-b8. That doesn't mean this poor person has nothing, though—they have a natural virtue (I can see Aristotle saying “and this is better than nothing...I guess...”). Part of the process by which this natural virtue can become a full virtue, however, will have to do with gaining phronesis, and thus all the other virtues, without which one cannot be fully virtuous.

It seems to me Aristotle must have thought that there are plenty of people around who have various natural virtues, but that no one exists or probably had ever existed who was a phronimos. In this way, we can liken the phronimos to Confucius' 聖人 sheng ren ("sage"). They are both ideals almost unattainable for real people. But, although Confucius gives us the more attainable goal of becoming junzi, Aristotle seems only to offer the phronimos, giving us the pinnacle but nothing less. Perhaps the idea here was that if we aim for the highest ideal, we'll get farther than if we aim for something lower, whereas Confucius took a more practical approach.

Anyway, this is the idea—any thoughts on this interpretation? Is this taking the natural virtue/full virtue distinction to do more work than Aristotle intended it to do? (this is one possible worry)

Does He Really Know Where the Ford Is?

2008-06-06T10:48:00.004-04:00

As is my habit, I've been thinking recently about topics that have almost nothing to do with my dissertation (or very little to do with it, anyway). In particular, I've been reflecting on the exchanges between Confucians and the Yangist-types in Book 18 of the Analects. Lots of interesting questions arise around these exchanges, and I thought I would just lay a couple of them out here. I make some attempt to answer them, but I'm still not completely satisfied with these answers. Anyway, here goes:

1) Who are the non-Confucian characters in 18.5, 18.6, and 18.7 supposed to represent? The Madman of Chu, of course, appears also in Zhuangzi, giving almost the same speech to Confucius as he does in 18.5, with a Zhuangzi-style twist. It seems likely that the Zhuangzi passage is later than this one, written as a reaction to Analects 18.5, as it has the same cast of characters and appears stylistically like a parody of the Analects passage, which is following with Zhuangzi's style in general. So, we should take 18.5, at least, as pre-Zhuangzi. But how long pre-Zhuangzi?

A.C. Graham thought that the passages may simply have shown us representatives of a more general tendency, derived from the folkish "shen nong" ideal, rather than a specific strain of philosophical thought such as Yangism, Laoism (for lack of a better term) or Zhuangism (ditto). Although I don't have a solid argument for this, it seems to me the characters in Book 18 represent a more coherent philosophical tendency than that of shennong idealism. Actually, I think there are three distinct arguments here by the Confucians in Book 18. My own view is that Book 18 is roughly contemporary with Zhuangzi, which is why Zhuangzi gets milage out of lampooning it. In addition, the three key passages from Book 18 are meant to present arguments against three types of "Yangist-like" movements. 18.5 is against the "Laoist", 18.6 is against the "Yangist/Zhuangist", and 18.7 against the general "shennong idealist".

This is more speculation than anything at this point. I have no strong textual argument for this yet, but it's based mainly on some hunches I get from looking at the responses of the non-Confucian characters in each of these passages. In 18.5, for example, the Madman of Chu laments the weakening of de 德 and suggests as a remedy that we recognize 來者猶可追 (things to come can be followed). Notice the similarity of zhui 追 here to the "Laoist" use of dao. This seems like a suggestion to follow the yin 陰 (low, weak, etc.) when necessary.

18.6 is more difficult, I think, and the root of my second question, so I'll skip it for now. 18.7 shows a peasant farmer who takes in Zilu for the night and chides him for not knowing how to farm. This person's folk demeanor and care for the land rather than for lofty philosophizing seems to mark him as one who would be praised by those raising up the folk "shennong" ideal.

So this brings me to question 2, about 18.6 specifically:

2) What is meant by the response of Chang Ju in 18.6: 是知津矣 ("He knows where the ford is")? I've spent years wondering what the right interpretation of this response to Zilu is. I still don't have anything I'd be comfortable betting on, but here's my best shot, for now: this sounds like a very Zhuangist response. Especially when we consider Zhuangzi's position in the Xiaoyaoyou chapter, in which he talks about perspectivalism, and the fault of privileging certain perspectives over others. Responding in this way to Zilu's question asking where a ford in the river could be found suggests that Chang Ju's criticism of Confucius' way is that the Confucian takes himself to have knowledge based on the narrow concerns they occupy themselves with, but is actually missing the wealth of other concerns and perspectives in the world. Thus Confucian knowledge is no knowledge at all. Confucius doesn't really know where the ford is, because he takes as complete knowledge that which deals with the narrow political concerns of human social groups. Many things of nature fall outside of the ritual context, and so for Confucius are things that cannot be (and need not be) known. Analects 11.12 is an example of this view: "without being able to serve people, how could you serve the spirits?"..."without knowing life, how could you know death?" Since Confucius restricts knowledge in this way to not only the human but the practical, Chang Ju criticizes him with a quip that seems equivalent to saying "if his knowledge is complete, he should know where the ford is. The fact that he does not know where the ford is shows that his narrow restriction of knowledge is inadequate for true understanding."

Thus, we might take Chang Ju to be saying something like: "Does he really know where the ford is?" Still, I'm not completely comfortable with this interpretation--as I said above, it's more of a hunch than anything. Personally, I've always found this reasoning to be the most effective "argument" against Confucianism, although it is merely suggestive. I tend toward the Confucian mindset more than the Yangist/Daoist, but this passage from the Analects has always captivated me more than either Confucius' response at the end (the "we cannot group with the birds and beasts" bit), or the arguments of the Zhuangzi or Laozi.

So, if this is the right reading of 18.6, does that mean that this passage is a response to Zhuangzi, and is later than 18.5? Or does it show that some of Zhuangzi's views on perspectivalism were already in the philosophical air at the time? Or--is my reading just the wrong way to interpret 18.6?

Cross-Cultural Art and Confucianism

2008-04-22T12:18:00.008-04:00

This is from an interesting exhibition by a Chinese artist discussed on a post on Frog in A Well. The artist was trained in Germany, and her pieces are comparative, with the German conception of something in blue on the left hand side, the Chinese conception on the right. A few of the pieces struck me as illustrating important points to keep in mind about Confucianism--like the above, which represents the two cultures' notions of social connectivity.

Check out the post, over at Frog in A Well. My favorites are the ones on "sense of the self" and "authority/the boss".

Yi (義) Can't Make a Junzi--Analects 17.23

2008-04-21T13:28:00.000-04:00

Here's an argument from Jiyuan Yu:

"for Confucius, being virtuous must involve an intellectual aspect, which he calls yi (義) a term which is etymologically related to yi (宜, 'what is fitting' or 'what is appropriate') and which I choose to translate as 'appropriateness.' Appropriateness is even said to be the most important factor for being an excellent person. In addition to Analects 4.10 [...] Confucius also says: 'for the excellent man it is appropriateness (yi) that is supreme.' (17.23)."

(Ethics of Confucius and Aristotle, p. 140)

I've got to call Yu out on this one. There is absolutely no way one can justifiably read 17.23 as showing that yi is "the most important factor for being an excellent person" (I assume he means junzi). Why is this? Well, let's look at the key bit of 17.23 being considered here:

君子義以為上，君子有勇而無義為亂，小人有勇而無義為盜。

(trans: The junzi should take yi as of greatest importance. The junzi who is brave but lacks yi will be disorderly. The petty person (xiao ren) who is brave by lacks yi will be a thief.)

I am unsure how anyone can use this to show that yi is a necessary condition for being a junzi. Not only does Confucius say that there can be a junzi without yi, "the junzi who is brave but lacks yi...", but he compares such a person with a petty person who lacks yi, and finds that each type of person has different qualities--the junzi without yi will be disordered, the xiao ren without yi will be a thief. So it simply cannot be the case that being in line with yi is necessary or sufficient for being a junzi. If it's necessary, then one cannot be a junzi without it, which 17.33 denies (as clearly as the bright noon sky). If it's sufficient, then one with yi should qualify as a junzi, which seems inconsistent with 17.33 (the xiao ren who is brave but lacks yi is a thief, but one who is brave and has yi is not a xiao ren at all??)

Yu seems to be reading Confucius in this way in order to make him closer to Aristotle than he actually is. The above quote from Yu comes from a chapter in which Yu is arguing that Aristotle's phronesis (practical wisdom) is similar to Confucius' yi, in that they are both intellectual aspects of cultivation of virtue the possession of which are necessary for one to be virtuous. This is true for Aristotle's phronesis, but it makes a joke out of 17.33--it seems to me that the only reason one would ever consider reading 17.33 the way Yu seems is because they have Aristotle glasses on. And even then, one has to deny that Confucius meant what he said in order to make it support the Aristotelian reading.

What Really Matters--Analects 13.18

2008-04-19T10:14:00.016-04:00

I've been thinking again about Confucian nepotism, because of the discussion on Manyul's blog some time back, and also because Jiyuan Yu talks a bit about it in his book (see review below).

The catalyst for all these discussions has been Analects 13.18:

葉公語孔子曰：「吾黨有直躬者，其父攘羊，而子證之。」孔子曰：

「吾黨之直者異於是：父為子隱，子為父隱。直在其中矣。」

(trans [Ames/Rosemont, modified]: The Governor of She in conversation with Confucius said, "In our village there is someone called '[Upright] Person'. When his father took a sheep on the sly, he reported him to the authorities." Confucius replied: "Those who are [upright] in my village conduct themselves differently. A father covers for his son, and a son covers for his father. [Uprightness consists of this].)

I've come to think that Analects 13.18 has a different purpose than some of the interpretations I've heard suggest. Basically, I read 13.18 as nepotistic, sure, but also as anti-theoretical or anti-idealist (I'll try to explain what I mean by this below). In a sense, it seems to me that what Confucius offered was simply an example of "common sense" ethics, which of course may have been more common-sensical in the ancient Chinese world than it is for us (although my intuitions strongly agree with Confucius here).

Consider this, from Jiyuan Yu (The Ethics of Confucius and Aristotle, p. 127): “This passage [13.18] has been a difficulty for commentators, as Confucius appears to endorse here a typical nepotistic behavior. In Confucius' judgment, however, this governor is not good because he encourages the disruption of filial love, the root of cultivation of all other virtues. He must be thinking that if the son turns the father in, he undermines the basis by which all virtues are nourished.”

Because Yu takes virtue (de) as central for Confucius, he holds that family matters are taken to be important as instructive, teaching one how to gain virtue. But this, of course, makes Confucius into a virtue consequentialist, and takes every normative claim in the Analects to have its basis in virtue. Of course, this is done in neither Confucius nor Aristotle. Confucius, in particular, is nowhere so concerned with theoretical constructs, making close relationships consequentially valuable in the way Yu suggests, and Confucius' statement in 13.18 might be seen as just such a denial. No principle, however noble, trumps the love and responsibilities one has for one's family, and if one takes principles as more important than family duties we can only see them as morally flawed.

A couple of historical examples come to mind. Famously, Mao Zedong pronounced his care for the people and his energy for fighting for their causes, yet he treated his own wives in characteristically cold and unfeeling ways (and, even more importantly, was cold toward his children). Perhaps Mao could justify this treatment by arguing that his energy was spent for the greater benefit of the whole people of China. A more recent example also comes to mind, that of Pakistani ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto. She was asked by a journalist about a month before her assassination if her constantly putting herself into danger was bad for her children, who would be emotionally hurt if she were killed. She answered that she cared about all the children in Pakistan just as much, suggesting that their needs trumped those of her own few children. Something struck me as deeply morally wrong with this, and I think Confucius would agree. He wouldn't buy it in either case. He was not, in this sense, a consequentialist. Yu's interpretation in essence takes Confucius to be a consequentialist with virtue playing the role of the good to be maximized, and family as good insofar as it can lead to virtue--but 13.18 seems to be a denial of that, rather than a theoretical specification of hierarchy of virtue.

There is a moral flaw in a person, like Mao or Bhutto (or the “upright” man from 13.18), who chooses the greater benefit of the people over his or her own family. In addition, we may be inclined to think it is a lie. What is really psychologically operative, we might think, is some callousness or lack of concern for one's own family, or an all-consuming ambition, rather than a great concern for the people. We, like Confucius, would find it hard to believe that one who cares so little about family that they could sacrifice them for principle (or cares so much for principle that they could harm their family) could actually care in any real sense for people they don't even know. (We could imagine Confucius making the inverse statement of 1.2—how could anyone ignoring filial care be ren?)

To take another example—think of people whose sons or daughters are involved in crimes. Do we ever hear people say: “well, if my son/daughter did that terrible thing, they ought to be punished...”? Indeed, wouldn't we think it rather callous if a parent did react this way? More common, I think, is the reaction a couple had when they discovered their son had been involved in a hit and run at the University of Connecticut last year—they tried to cover it up. He was, after all, their son—and I can't say I would have done differently if my own son were in that situation. Of course, this does not constitute an argument that such nepotism is morally right, but I think Confucius is simply playing on a common intuition (in his time and place) here. “Family first” is the intuition, and it's one I share.

This is actually one of the things I've always admired about the Confucius of the Analects—he he has a way of pulling us down to earth when we get carried away constructing fancy ethical theories.

Are We Arguing Past Each Other?

2008-04-09T12:15:00.009-04:00

I really dislike the fact that my posts have become so overwhelmingly negative in the recent past. There are a couple of reasons (perhaps good ones) for this, however. First--I'm currently in the middle of writing the "negative portion" of my dissertation, in which I argue against the interpretations of Confucius I oppose, in order to lay the ground for my own interpretation. This inevitably leads to some negativity, I guess. Second--I'm in the middle of reading some interpretations of Confucius I believe are very problematic, and thus more objections are rising to the surface of the mind than usually do.

The latest example of this is in my reading of Jiyuan Yu's book The Ethics of Confucius and Aristotle: Mirrors of Virtue. I am finding that in this book, as in May Sim's book on this topic (see below post), my problem is not so much with the interpretations of Confucius presented (which I also disagree with), but rather with the manner of argumentation used to establish these conclusions about Confucius, which in both Sim's and Yu's case I find far from ideal. Their manner of argument is so lacking, by my estimation, that I've come to think that maybe something different is going on in these texts than what I expect of philosophical work. Clearly, both Sim and Yu are very smart people (though both are Aristotle specialists, rather than Chinese philosophy specialists), but some of their interpretive argumentation on Confucius leaves me stunned by its weakness.

Often, I find claims made about what Confucius held, then citations of passages in the Analects where Confucius supposedly says it. To say the least, this is a problematic way to argue for interpretations of a historical text. One cannot simply point to a passage in a particular text when there is principled debate over the correct interpretation of that passage. If we are to offer a particular interpretation and use a passage from a text to reinforce it, we need to argue that the passage we cite actually does the work we claim it does.

Here is an example from Yu's book of an argument thus wanting. On p. 27, Yu writes:

"The 'Mandate of Heaven' theory presupposes that Heaven has its own will and issues commands. In the Spring and Autumn period, this is said to be the dao of Heaven. Heaven was thought to have its own norm, and humankind has its way as well. When Analects 3:24 claims that Heaven commands Confucius to restore the dao, it shows that Confucius introduces the concepts of Heaven and dao (way) into the center of ethics. [...] The divine mission indicates that the correct way of being a human is that which is in accordance with the way of Heaven."

Note what Yu is doing here. He is using Analects 3:24 to support his interpretation that tian and dao are at the center of Confucius' ethics. And they are at the center in a number of ways, according to Yu, including being, like the ancient Greek concept of 'the good', the ground of moral norms. This view is very similar, of course, to all ancient Greek ones, including Aristotle. It also has a striking similarity to later medieval Christian views, in which God is the ultimate ground of moral norms, and his command, or what he loves, is what fixes the good. This is a pretty radical interpretation of Confucius, however, and it makes 3:24 do a lot of work. If we can get all of this from 3:24, one should at least expect an argument from the text that 3:24 actually does suggest what Yu says it does. But we are given nothing like this. No consideration of the language of the text, no comparison to other passages in the Analects in which Confucius uses similar language in order to test the coherence of this interpretation, no consideration of how the terms used in 3:24 are generally used in contemporary and near-contemporary texts... just a pointing to 3:24.

So let's look at 3:24. The crucial segment of this passage reads:

天將以夫子為木鐸 tian jiang yi fuzi wei mu duo (trans: "Tian is about to use the master as a wooden warning bell.")

Now, it requires some muscular argument to show that this justifies the conclusion that tian and dao are at the center of Confucius' ethics in any sense, especially the strong sense of being the ground of moral norms. Why, indeed, shouldn't we simply read this as colloquial and pragmatic--something like "The teacher is about to set people straight on what's right." If I were to utter this sentence right now in a conversation with a friend or student, one could hardly use this as evidence to show that I have any conception of a central ground of moral norms, let alone as evidence to show what that ground is.

So, what's the problem here? It seems obvious to me that robust linguistic and textual argument is required to support one's interpretation of any historical philosopher, whether it be Confucius, Aristotle, or Descartes. So maybe there's something I'm missing. Perhaps what is going on is that I simply have a different conception of what it is to do historical interpretive philosophy than Sim and Yu (and some others). Perhaps they are working from a method in which creativity in construing the texts trumps historical accuracy. But many of the things they claim in their works seem to suggest that this is not what they're doing. After all, they are claiming to be representing Confucius, rather than a creative ethical theory inspired by Confucius. And there is some historical argument (although an inadequate amount) in these works. And both authors claim to want to offer an authentic picture of Confucius. So why are these arguments so empty?

What's going on here? Are we just arguing past one another because we don't share methodology? If so, perhaps the focus of some of these arguments between pro and anti "Confucius as virtue ethicist" philosophers should move from interpretation to interpretive methodology.

Problematic Arguments To Link Confucius and Aristotle

2008-04-02T10:50:00.011-04:00

Here is a line of reasoning I don't understand--or if I do understand it correctly, then it's an invalid argument. I thought I'd throw this out there to see what others think about this.

I've been reading May Sim's book Remastering Morals With Aristotle and Confucius, which presents an interpretation of Confucian ethics (mostly represented by the Analects) as resembling to some (great) degree Aristotle's virtue ethics. This is the kind of interpretation I'm arguing against in my dissertation (which is consuming the little qi I have left!). I have numerous problems with virtue ethical interpretations of Confucius, which I won't go into here--but one common type of argument Sim uses in her book to show the "commensurability" of Confucius (of the Analects) and Aristotle stands out as particularly distressing to me.

She argues, in chapter 2 of her book (a type of argument which is repeated in later chapters), that Confucius implicitly accepted Aristotle's ten categories (substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time position, state or condition, action, and affection). She goes about showing this by mentioning passages of the Analects in which Confucius uses language that she takes to presume that he is operating with some view of various of these categories, accepting these categories (in some sense).

The discussion about substance is the clearest place the problem arises. Sim argues against those who hold that Confucius has no view of a substantial self similar to that of Aristotle. Sim first discusses Confucius' view that one's roles dictate the actions they ought to perform. Then she says, on p. 57:

"Even if one's roles do dictate how to act (with shu, zhong, or yi) in various situations, an account of that which is capable of issuing forth such actions is still needed. Confucius, without theorizing about it, does in discussion invoke a stronger sense of a self than commentators allow. Thus the Confucian self is minimally 'substantial;' it persists through various changes, is the source of agency, and can adopt various roles and perform them more or less well.”

This argument seems to me straightforwardly invalid. Before I discuss that, though, let me quote Sim further (from the same page:

"The distinction between one who fills her roles well and one who does not rests in an investment of the person. A substantial enough self must be presupposed for such an investment. Without such a minimal self, we can have neither personal investment nor ownership of the action, let along a creative addition to the tradition." The footnote to this reads: "That a more substantial self is already there in Confucian literature is visible when Confucius mentions that filial piety consists in refraining from reforming a father's way for three years after a father's death (1.11). Such talk of refrain or restraint presupposes that there is some figment of a self that is to be restrained beyond that of a son whose role is to adhere to the father's wishes--for what of the years following the mourning?"

It seems to me that Sim is basically arguing here that Confucius is using language which commits him to a view of the self as substantial--that is, he is using 'I' and 'self' language. First of all, it is wrong to assume that language use commits us to any particular metaphysical view. This is a pretty radical view, so it needs to be argued for. And there seem to be clear counterexamples to that anyway--what about the (later) Buddhists, or Hume, for example? The Buddhist view of the self (like Hume's), is explicitly anti-substance, yet they use the same colloquial language as any of us, including “I” to formulate their views (including ethical views). Their use of common language to formulate their ethical views does not show that they (implicitly or otherwise) held a view of a substantial self--so how does Confucius' use of 'I' and 'self' language show that? I don't think that when I utter 'I'm going up the street to get a soda then I'm coming back' I commit myself to Aristotelian notions of the substantial self, even if that is the right view of the self.

What Sim might be doing here is claiming that Aristotle's view of the substantial self is the correct metaphysics of the self, and thus when we talk about selves or use personal pronouns, we are implicitly holding such a view. If this is what she's doing, though, it's false. Our language use does not commit us to the correct metaphysical view of whatever we are talking about, any more than the identity between water and H20 would have committed Marcus Aurelius to holding the view that the liquid in his chalice was a chemical compound composed of molecules of two hydrogen atoms covalently bonded to one oxygen atom. Certainly "having a metaphysical view that x" is an opaque context, if anything is. And if it's not, then it's not only Confucius who implicitly accepts Aristotle's notion of a substantial self, but anyone who has ever used 'I' language, including Hume and the Buddhists. So we all accept Aristotle's substantial self, whether we know it or not! But that's just false--it seems incoherent to say, for example, that the early scientists who proposed the phlogiston theory actually implicitly held the correct view about the chemistry of burning, because they used the language of 'fire', 'burning', etc.

It seems that the only thing that could make Sim's argument valid is a premise to the effect that "when one uses language and makes claims about certain concepts, one implicitly accepts (or is committed to) the correct metaphysical theories regarding those concepts." But then the argument trades in its invalidity for unsoundness, because that premise is clearly false!

Any thoughts?

Listening to the Past

2008-03-27T21:54:00.004-04:00

I love things like this--announced by many news sources today, here is the first audio recording in human history, from 1860, of a person singing "Au Clair de la Lune". With the constant focus on the future in our society, it is refreshing to take a moment to look into (and listen to) our past. I just wish we did it more often. Confucius would approve.

--here's the story..

The "Al Qaeda Effect" and Why We Don't Care About the Uighurs

2008-03-22T10:44:00.004-04:00

Recently, problems in Tibet have been in the news again, with the riots on the occasion of the 49th anniversary of the "National Uprising" against Chinese rule after which the Dalai Lama fled to India. Only days before this, there was reportedly an attempt to bomb a China Southern Airlines flight by a Uighur separatist group attempting to get attention for their cause ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games this summer (though this has been questioned by some Uighur groups and human rights groups).

The difference between the media attention and responses each of these has attracted in the US, is startling. One of the main things it shows me is that, while Americans seem to have undying sympathy for the Tibetan cause, we either ignore the Uighurs, or malign them as Islamic terrorists, following the Chinese rhetoric designed to undermine their cause, even though the violence against the Uighurs is as at least as bad as that against the Tibetans. Chinese rhetoric on Tibet largely falls on deaf ears in the US, as does that on their role in the Darfur crisis. Generally we disbelieve the official proclamations on these issues, and side (morally, at least) with the opposition.

With the Xinjiang situation, however, things are different. The newest Chinese claim is that Al Qaeda (along with the Taliban) has infiltrated the region and is behind the separatist movements there (hey, why not throw in Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson, and Lex Luthor while you're at it?). This, of course, is about as plausible as the weak 2003 claims of the Bush administration that Al Qaeda was in bed with Saddam Hussein, and perhaps (unfortunately) it will be as successful. Al Qaeda, of course, has become the global Bogeyman which is easily trotted out to undermine the legitimacy of certain Islamic regimes and movements who have tenuous, if any, links to the shadowy organization. It has become all too easy to completely dehumanize and disengage with any state or other entity by pasting them with the "Al Qaeda" title.

As we saw with Iraq, making claims of Al Qaeda connection with a certain entity is generally given as justification for using force against the entity. The Chinese have certainly noticed this, and they're jumping on board now, too. Regardless of what the United States and other influential countries think, of course, the Chinese government will probably continue their violations of human rights in the Xinjiang region as well as in Tibet and elsewhere. China's essential role in the global economy will ensure that other countries will continue to avoid putting much pressure on China for these violations, but it seems that now China has come up with a way to avoid having any attention payed to their rights violations in the Xinjiang region, by attempting to work the magic of the "Al Qaeda Effect" on the Uighurs.

A Matter of Efficacy

2008-02-24T22:12:00.008-05:00

Well--I'm finally on my way back to the good old USA, and thought: "what could be a better way of spending my last few hours in India than doing some writing on early Confucianism?"

So--I've been thinking recently about a question that seems to continually arise when I present my work on Confucianism to philosophers working outside of Chinese philosophy. The question is: to what extent for Confucians (as represented by the Analects, at least) is the use of force acceptable as a means of ensuring communal agreement and the correct ordering of the social hierarchy? Variations of this question, I have noticed, always come up when I present to non-specialists, and hardly ever come up when I present to specialists. In fact, when I was first confronted with this question, I had to respond that I hadn't given it much thought myself, even though I spend a whole lot of time thinking about early Confucianism.

So, two questions occur to me now: 1) why do non-specialists tend to worry about the issue mentioned above more than specialists? 2) what is Confucius' view on the use of force? I think that both of these questions can be answered by looking not to the Analects, however, but to the Daodejing, which shares certain features with Confucian literature (even the Analects!), and offers better explanations of some processes discussed in the Confucian as well as the Daoist literature.

The passage of the DDJ that seems relevant here (as well as my favorite DDJ passage) is DDJ 17 (Lau trans.):

"The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects. Next comes the ruler they love and praise; next comes the one they fear; next comes the one with whom they take liberties. When there is not enough faith, there is lack of good faith. Hesitant, he does not utter words lightly. When his task is accomplished and his work done, the people all say, 'it happened to us naturally.'"

For the daoist, like the Confucian, the use of force to attain order (or one's goals, whatever they are) is acceptable, but a sign that one is doing something wrong. A ruler who needs to resort to force has failed in a fundamental way. This, of course, is not because it is somehow wrong to use force--arguably the classical Chinese tradition in general did not see violence as intrinsically an evil, as does (for the most part) the post-Christianity western tradition. Rather, the reason using force is not as good as other methods is, as DDJ 17 suggests, a matter of efficacy, with which the Chinese tradition is deeply concerned.

DDJ 17 suggests that the "shadowy presence" is the best kind of ruler because this ruler is the one who will be able to impose his will on the people without their even knowing it. Why, we might ask, is this situation the best one for a ruler to be in? To take a strictly Machiavellian (or Legalist, for that matter) line here, the "shadowy presence" will be, of the four types of ruler, the one whose power is most secure. Think of this in terms of likelihood of rebellion and overthrow. The "shadowy presence" cannot be rebelled against or overthrown, because his will is invisible. The people do his will seemingly of their own will, so the only ones they have to rebel against if they disapprove of what they must do is themselves! The ruler who is loved is not quite as stable in his power. He has some stability, however, because the people are unlikely to rebel against and overthrow this ruler. Their love for him keeps him in power, and the people will not go against their ruler even when the opportunity arises. The ruler who is feared and imposes his will by force (this is where the "justifiability of force" question comes to play) is less secure than either the "shadowy presence" or the ruler who is loved, because even though he can keep order while he has strength, if the opportunity arises or if the ruler's strength diminishes, the people will quickly rebel and overthrow this ruler. Thus, his power is based on volatile external situations--there is much that is simply out of his control, and thus his hold on power is less secure. The ruler with whom the people take liberties, of course, is doomed, because he does not even have the fear of the people to rely on. They do not respect his will, and are likely to subvert it whenever they feel like it. This kind of ruler is a ruler in name only, and has no control over his people.

It is not only in terms of holding power that we can read DDJ 17, however. It will also be true that the better types of rulers will be more effective at making a virtuous society, etc. Just like much of the DDJ, 17 does not offer us normative claims about ends, but about means. The DDJ offers us a method, whereas the Confucian and Mohist texts give us a picture of the ends we ought to be aiming to achieve. The Daoist concern with method rather than ends, however, does not mean that its methods are all that different from those of the Confucian, and on this issue (rulership), they seem to line up nicely. What is the "shadowy presence" of DDJ 17, after all, if not the sagely ruler of Analects 2.1 who, like the pole star, simply "facing south" creates virtue through the de around which the people gravitate?

So, this is the beginning of an answer to question 2 above, I think. What about question 1? That is--why do non-specialists focus on the question of whether force is justified in Confucianism as a way to realize the goals of the community? I suspect that one of the reasons for this is that the notion of the rulership in the western tradition has developed in a somewhat different way than in the Chinese tradition. The "shadowy presence" has not been seen as the ideal of rulership in much of western history (there are, of course, exceptions, including Machiavelli). Rather, the "loved and praised" ruler whose power is on full display has been the ideal for much of western history (Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, etc.). The benevolent and powerful king whose commands are direct and clear for the world to see but who is well loved--this has been the western ideal. The noble Homeric warrior, storming the front lines of the enemy's army, rather than the ninja in the shadows or the sniper blending in with concrete and raining silent death from above, has been the western ideal. Thus, perhaps resorting to force to control a community is seen as a "plan B" in this tradition, whereas it is less justified in the Chinese tradition, being a measly "plan C". This, along with the fact that violence in itself is not seen as intrinsically evil in Chinese thought, as it is in much of western (post-Christian) thought, may help to explain why the "force question" arises more among non-specialists in Chinese philosophy than it does among specialists. Of course, I'm not completely comfortable with this answer, but I'll need to reflect on this some more to come up with something better. Any thoughts?

That's What Superdelegates (Like Friends) Are For

2008-02-22T22:27:00.003-05:00

I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with the talk during this year's presidential elections about the unfairness of the status of "superdelegates" in the primary process. Of course, this issue has only arisen in the Democratic party contest this year, as the Republican race is all but settled in favor of my candidate, John McCain (I was a McCain supporter at the beginning of all this when he was only polling 10 percent, I might add).

In the Democratic race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, of course, superdelegates are likely to play an important role (this, from the Washington Times, is some evidence). This seems to have many people upset, as they see this as intrinsically "undemocratic". The flames of this fire are, of course, fanned by the news media. However, I'm not sure why Americans should be upset about superdelegates and their status. Consider first this fact (often insisted upon by fellow Republicans): The U.S.A. is not a democracy, in the pure sense of the word. It is is a federal republic. We practice representative government, not direct democracy. We do not take national votes on issues of the legislature, and we vote for people to hold offices in which they are entitled to make decisions affecting the actions of the government. Second, consider this: superdelegates are (mostly) elected officials, part of whose responsibilities are to exercise their own judgments (not those of the polls) in order to come to decisions on whom to support. If their votes "count more than ours", it is because they have responsibilites beyond ours for which they have been selected by vote. It is similar to the case of Presidents selecting Supreme Court nominees.

So please, my Democratic friends, please...stop complaining about the superdelegates or expecting them to "validate the will of the people". Ought they not, as we would expect of a responsible person, decide what they think is best, rather than following the tide, changing with the wind?

Brainwashing With A Light Touch

2008-02-21T10:44:00.002-05:00

I've been reading Kathleen Taylor's book "Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control" lately, and have learned some interesting things which I think are relevant to the project of understanding Confucius and Chinese philosophical thought in general. According to Taylor, the origin of the term "brainwashing" comes from (guess what!) the Chinese term xi nao, which described a process of "thought control" used by the Chinese Communists, and which US captives were subjected to during the Korean War.

This revelation prompted me to write this post, as I've been thinking about these issues quite a bit lately. In a post a few days ago, I talked about the difference between Aristotelian "virtues" and Confucian "dispositions" (for lack of a better term) as turning on the lack of reason as necessary support for Confucius. What is important for Confucius is that one have certain dispositions, not that one have them supported by any particular reasons. This, of course, raises the question of how one comes to gain dispositions one does not already have. The Analects and other Confucian literature is deeply concerned with this. It is the central question: how do we cultivate good dispositions? For Confucius, gaining such dispositions is a complex task, and requires surrounding oneself with others who have the desired dispositions, being open to instruction and deferent to one's superiors, avoiding people without the desired dispositions, and strictly adhering to ritual (li), which includes integrating oneself fully into the community--becoming ren, (remember Analects 12.1--ke ji fu li wei ren). In addition, Confucius seems to think that it is helpful to have a ruler with good dispositions in order to cultivate these in the people. Many passages in the Analects attest to the moral importance of the ruler. He is to act as the "pole star" around which others orbit, setting an example for others. Indeed, Confucius says that if the ruler is virtuous, the people will simply become so, with no particular effort on the part of the ruler. It is the de of the good ruler which causes the people to rectify their own behavior, rather than any actions the ruler takes.

Confucius speaks similarly about how one manages to gain ren ("humanity"). Analects 4.1, for example, suggests that li ren ("being in the vicinity of ren) is instrumental to gaining ren. How does this process work? It seems to me that in both cases (being in the midst of ren and the ruler as moral example) what is working here is a kind of psychological habituation. This is a well known phenomenon in psychology--and even us non-psychologists know that we tend to be like the people we run with. We always advise the addict to cut their old ties and surround themselves with people who avoid their drug of choice and are supportive of their new lifestyle. This is also the case with moral cultivation, for Confucius. We might take the Analects to be recommending a kind of moral rehab. And the moral rehab, like its substance abuse cousin, isn't in the business of reasons.

So what's really going on here? I think that the practice of "brainwashing" offers us a useful analogy. Robert Lifton, in his book "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism", describes what he sees as eight indicators of thought control regimens, carried out by totalitarian groups. All eight of them seemed very familiar as recommended to some extent by most of the classical Chinese philosophers I've studied. But three of Lifton's indicators in particular struck me as very Confucian:

"mystical manipulation--evoking certain patterns of behavior and emotion in such a way that they seem to be spontaneous...the demand for purity--the belief that elements outside the chosen group should be eliminated [or avoided] to prevent them from contaminating the minds of group members...sacred science--viewing the ideology's basic dogmas as both morally unchallengeable and scientifically exact, thus increasing their apparent authority..." (from Taylor).

With some change in wording, these principles could have come right out of the Analects. It's no coincidence, I think, that the term 'brainwashing' originated with Chinese practices. The ancients endorsed it. We might call what sages like Confucius advocated as "Brainwashing with a Light Touch." Certainly Confucius would have thought something had gone wrong if one had to resort to torture or other harsh methods in order to "reform one's thought", but it is not so clear that he would have rejected the basic methods of brainwashing in order to bring about good dispositions. It is, after all, in the Confucian Xunzi (a better Confucian than Mencius, I think), where we see a great deal of "expedient means" style teaching, which becomes even more apparent in the work of Xunzi's most brilliant student and (I think) the only one who truly realized the inherent power of the Confucian "method" (even though he clearly ignored other bits of Confucian teaching). It's always seemed to me that "brainwashing" is an extreme version of habituation anyway, in which the process of habituation is sped up through a variety of means.

Don't Scientologists Have Rights?

2008-02-21T00:11:00.002-05:00

Forgive me, enlightened readers, for defending Scientology for a moment. Of course, I am not a scientologist myself, and I find many of their teachings and methods as strange as the next man, but I can't help but believe that they are not given a fair shake in the general public, including the media. A Washington Post article today quotes Michael Shermer, in an LA Times piece, in which he said:

"I'm a scientist who studies belief systems for a living, so take it from me: Scientology is unlike any other religion in history. Although the Church of Scientology is recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as a tax-exempt religion (despite years of litigation by the IRS to collect taxes on its income), no other religion I know of considers theological doctrines and core religious tenets to be intellectual property accessible only for a fee."

As the Post article rightly points out, the Scientology clan doesn't have a corner on the practice of making money on religion (just cruise by the home of any pastor of an evangelical megachurch in your neighborhood and you'll be quickly disabused of the notion that Scientology alone is a profitable business). So how exactly does their focus on being profitable set Scientology apart from other major religions operating today? Scientologists, just as Evangelical Christians, would tell you that "saving souls" is their first priority, but why must that rule out making money?
Shermer seems to suggest that the reason this practice is unacceptable in the case of Scientology is that "most of us do not consider Scientology a religion, at least not a religion that resembles in the slightest the world's major faiths." But this seems like a sorry reason to me. Since when is it is a necessity that any religion, in order to qualify as a religion, must resemble "the world's major faiths?" Imagine that Hinduism were formed today, instead of thousands of years ago. If this were the case, it would certainly not resemble the established religions in many ways. Would we therefore be justified in withholding the title of "religion" from Hinduism?

Indeed, it seems trivially true that any truly new religion will differ greatly from other established religions--otherwise it would not be a new religion, but a variant of an already existing religion. Scientology, even with its focus on making a profit, seems to me to qualify as a religion. We, in the United States, have decided that religious organizations qualify for tax-exempt status. If we are going to be consistent with this, we ought to accept that Scientology qualifies. If, however, we are wary of granting this status to Scientology, perhaps we ought to rethink the practice in general. Perhaps the evangelical megachurches should not be tax-exempt.

I suspect that what is behind much of the mud being slung at Scientology is simply the resistance many of us feel toward new religions in general. We tend to think of religions which are not old and revered traditions as somehow fake or insincere. I'm not sure why this is the case, considering that every religion was once "new". And as much as I heap scorn upon new religions here (see my post on Falun Gong, for example, which I particularly dislike), as a good libertarian (at least concerning social issues) I can't help but feel that we should give Scientologists a break. Plus--isn't free enterprise the American ideal? They're selling a product and people are buying it!

Reasons? We Don't Need No Stinking Reasons!

2008-02-19T03:18:00.004-05:00

One of the key differences between Confucius and Aristotle (or perhaps the western virtue ethical tradition in general) is the focus on reason in the cultivation of virtue--which is central to Aristotle, and completely missing in Confucius. For Aristotle, a "natural disposition" which one has and which predisposes them to a certain type of action, does not count as an "excellence" unless this disposition is supported by right reason. A person who performs generous actions does not have the virtue of "generosity" unless their actions are in conformity with right reasons, which, in this case, would have to do with the knowledge of the goodness of acts of generous type for one's character, with the intention being to aim at eudaimonia, etc. One who is generous not for these reasons but simply because they have an innate, natural tendency to act generously (genetically inherited, perhaps), does not have the virtue of "generosity"--that is, they do not have "excellence proper" (N. Ethics, Ross translation), but "natural excellence", which is of lower quality, and does not entail unity of the virtues. One who only has the natural excellence of generosity and not the full excellence might be unvirtuous in a number of other ways (cowardly, weak-willed, etc.), while one with the virtue of generosity will possess, of necessity, practical wisdom (phronesis), which (if I'm reading the Nicomachean Ethics correctly) ensures that one possesses all the other virtues.

I read Confucius as taking a very different line on virtue. For him, what Aristotle calls the "natural excellences" are actually superior to those which need to be learned (or supported by reasons). Analects 16.9 reads:

孔子曰：「生而知之者，上也；學而知之者，次也；困而學之，又其次也。困而不學，民斯為下矣！」
Confucius said: 'Those who are born knowing it are the first class (shang); those who know it through study (xue) are next; those who have difficulty yet learn it are next; those who have difficulty and do not learn it, they are the lowest class of the people!'

This passage talks specifically about zhi zhi ("knowing it"), and thus one might claim that it is not virtue that is discussed in this passage, but knowledge of the reasons for action, or knowledge of what to do--or something like this. However, I think this is the wrong way to interpret 16.9. "Knowledge" seems to be used here, as often (but not always!) in the Analects, as performance, so that "knowing it" is here taken as identical to "doing it". When zhi is used this way in the Analects, it is generally shown in a positive light. On the other hand, when zhi is used in the sense of "propositional knowledge" it is disparaged. And if this latter sense is what is meant in 16.9, it is unclear why those who possess such knowledge from birth (perhaps Confucius was way ahead of his time...) are ranked higher than the rest of us just because they possess it. After all, if possession of such knowledge does not necessitate performance, than one who has knowledge from birth might in practice be a xiao ren ("petty person"), while one who has to learn it might act in an exemplary fashion even approaching sageliness. So it seems likely that 16.9 is talking about something like disposition or performance, rather than propositional knowledge.

Given that this is the case, there are no virtues in the system of the Analects, by Aristotle's lights. And it seems worse than this. Given that right reason occupies such an important place in Aristotle's ethics, doesn't the absence of this feature in Confucius' ethics make it difficult to hold, as Van Norden does, that Confucius and Aristotle are simply giving two different "thick" theoretical descriptions of the same "thin" concept of virtue? Without the rational requirement, Aristotle might simply say that we are not dealing with anything like virtue, because "natural excellence" has no connection with practical wisdom, unity of the virtues, or the all-important eudaimonia!
I've not yet read completely through Van Norden's Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy, so I'm not sure how he confronts this difficulty, but he doesn't say much about it in the early part of the book. I, for one, don't buy into the "virtue" interpretation of Confucius, for a number of reasons--this being only one of them.

Any ideas on this?

Why No Trancendence in China, Then?

2008-02-16T22:51:00.003-05:00

Heinrich Zimmer's classic "Philosophies of India" (edited by J. Campbell) makes an interesting and occassionally remarked on point about the reasons for the focus on transcendence in Indian philosophy, while this is seemingly absent in Chinese philosophy (misreadings of Daoism aside, of course...). Zimmer says:

"One cannot but feel that such a sublime flight as India's into the transcendental realm would never have been attempted had the conditions of life been the least bit less hopeless. Release (moksa) can become the main preoccupation of thought only when what binds human beings to their secular normal existences affords absolutely no hope--represents only duties, burdens, and obligations, proposing no promising tasks or aims that stimulate and justify mature ambitions on the plane of earth. India's propensity for transcendental pursuit and the misery of India's history are, most certainly, intimately related to each other; they must not be regarded separately." (p. 82-83)

Of course, Zimmer was clearly being careful to maintain that hopelessness is a necessary, not a sufficient condition for a culture's concern with transcendence. Still, is this right? The obvious difficulty of course is the case of ancient China. Prospects for people in many periods in Chinese history (including the formative Warring States period) were every bit as bleak as those in low periods in Indian history. If there is such a close connection between misery and concern with transcendence, as Zimmer claims, why should misery not be a sufficient condition? And if it isn't a sufficient condition, what else is required to bring about the concern with transcendence? I suspect that Zimmer's claim is false. In the Chinese case, we see two very different responses to a collapsing society and human misery--the advent of the social crusader who strives to bring back order (Confucians, Mohists), and the attempt to salvage one's own "vital essence" (qi) (Yangists, Daoists). It's certainly not obvious that either of these are connected with "transcendental pursuit". And, even though Zimmer's claim is only that misery is a necessary condition, we still might ask the question of him: what was so different about China that made its misery cause philosophers to look to the order of the world, rather than, like ancient India and Greece (Plato, at least), to the transcendent? For that matter--what was the necessary (according to Zimmer) strife that led Plato to his own transcendental pursuits? His disastrous lack of success in politics?

Back In Action!

2008-02-16T11:55:00.005-05:00

As readers may have noticed, there's been an enormous pause at this blog--it was even down for a week or so. Lots has happened to make this the case, including sickness (myself and my son), traveling to India (where I've been since the start of January and will be for another week), and worrying about how to get some work done on the dissertation over here. So--now since many of the problems have been solved, I'm ready to jump back into the action. Manyul Im has recently begun a Chinese Philosophy blog, at http://manyulim.wordpress.com/, where there are some interesting things going on.

Meanwhile, I'm busy making a bit of a change at Unpolished Jade. I'll be collapsing my general website into this page (consolidation gives birth to organization!), and in following with this, I'll also be bringing my various blogging concerns together. So, while this blog will still be filled with Chinese philosophy, now you'll also see more broad topics here (most likely some history, contemporary politics, globalization, foreign relations, etc.). And also I'll sometimes post a bit on books that might be of interest to those with interest in things Asian (in general). Still, the words of the sages are always the priority here!

Reflections on Analects 12.1--Translations and Commentary

2007-11-03T12:44:00.000-04:00

Analects (first part): 顏淵問仁。子曰﹕克己復禮為仁。一日克己復仁﹐天下歸仁焉。為仁由己﹐而由人乎哉?

English Commentarial Translations

(McLeod trans.) Yan Yuan asked about ren. The master said: "conforming oneself to and thus returning to ritual creates ren. If for one day one could conform oneself to and thereby return to ritual, the whole world would then return to ren. One creates ren oneself--can others possibly do it?"

(Slingerland trans.) Yan Hui asked about Goodness. The Master said, "Restraining yourself and returning to the rites constitutes Goodness. If for one day you managed to restrain yourself and return to the rites, in this way you could lead the entire world back to Goodness. The key to achieving Goodness lies within yourself--how could it come from others?"

Slingerland is doing two interesting things here. First--He reads the wei as constitutive, which disagrees with Zhu Xi's reading (below) and leaves Analects 9.1 unclear, and also seems to broaden ren, because of the many other wei ren formulations. However, then the internal/external definition problem becomes pressing, if one wants to maintain that ren lies on either of these sides, rather than containing both, as I claim.
Second, he takes ke as "restraint", likening it to yue (in 4.23). I think this is correct. However, this can also lend support to Kong Anguo's reading as "can of oneself", where 'restraint' is thought of in terms of discipline, self-control. The discipline here is surely meant as connected to ritual, which is why I translate as "conforming oneself to [ritual]". It is not just the ke ji that creates (or is) ren, it is the ke ji with ritual. Focusing on the ke ji without its ritual connection neglects the external factor clearly at work here. Slingerland claims precedent, saying his reading "follows early commentators such as Ma Rong and Huang Kan", but what about Kong Anguo, in the He Yan commentary, which is earlier than either?
Also, Xing Bing (and Daniel Gardner, following him) holds, as I do, that the two senses, Ma Rong's and Kong Anguo's are compatible in the way suggested above, that restraint is thought of in the sense of turning of one's own volition to ritual. (Gardner, p. 83): "for He Yan, Kong's remark, 'if the self is able to return to ritual' is not basically at odds with Ma's understanding of the line 'to restrain the self and return to ritual.'" It appears to me that the best way to explain the sense of the unification of the two is through the notion of conforming oneself to ritual--which suggests both restraint, and self imposition, as well as the necessary connection to ritual itself.

(Ames and Rosemont trans.) Yan Hui inquired about authoritative conduct. The Master replied, "Through self-discipline and observing ritual propriety one becomes authoritative in one's conduct. If for the space of a day one were able to accomplish this, the whole empire would defer to this authoritative model. Becoming authoritative in one's conduct is self-originating--how could it originate with others?"

This is closer to my own reading, in that ke is taken as disciplining combined with ritual, rather than focus on the restraint which allows one to return to ritual, though Slingerland does a better job at retaining some of the neutrality of the text--which neither Ames and Rosemont nor my own translation here attempts.

(Chan trans.) follows Zhu Xi explicitly. Note claiming that Zhu Xi's reading of ke ji was "to master oneself", and Chan follows this.

(Fingarette) "self-disciplined and ever turning to li."

This is much closer to my own rendering. Benjamin Schwartz says that Fingarette is concerned with tying in the bit about the self and its control to ritual, seeing these two as "sides of the same coin"--one formulation. I completely agree. (Schwartz. p. 77) "One simply notes that Fingarette's version very much stresses the absolute simultaneity and inseparability of the two halves of the statement, implying that the self-discipline and the performance of li are two sides of the same coin. the first translation ("curb your ego and submit to li"), supported by a majority of Chinese commentators, suggests that the correct performance of the li presupposes a sustained inner effort to overcome those evil impulses which prevent the performance of li in the spirit appropriate to li."
Schwartz, I think, is wrong here, both about the reading and about the commentators. By "the majority of Chinese commentators," he must mean post Cheng/Zhu commentators. Certainly Ma Rong and Kong Anguo, the commentators mentioned in the much earlier He Yan commentary, do not hold this view. And if we can offer an explanation of why the later commentators went wrong, this further undermines Schwartz' offered support for his reading, which echoes Zhu Xi in key ways, taking the internal half of the formulation as central, and the latter external half as secondary.

Chinese Commentary

He Yan: 馬曰克己約身﹐孔曰復反也身能反禮則為仁矣。Ma (Rong) said: ke ji is "to restrain the self" (yue shen). Kong (Anguo) said: fu is "to return" (fan). If one can return one self (shen) to ritual then there is ren." 行善在己不在人也。 "The practice of being good depends on oneself not on others."

Zhu Xi (Gardner trans.): "True goodness [ren] is the virtue of the original mind-and-heart [xin] in its wholeness. Ke [to subdue] is sheng, 'to overcome or subdue.' Ji [the self] refers to the selfish desires of the self [shen zhi si yu]. Fu [to return] is fan, "to return"... 'The practice of true goodness' [wei ren] is the means of preserving whole the virtue of the mind-and-heart. Now, the virtue of the mind-and-heart in its wholeness is nothing but heavenly principle and thus can only be harmed by human desire. Consequently, to practice true goodness, one must have the wherewithal to subdue selfish desires and thereby return to ritual." [note the focus on subduing of desires as the operative condition, and return to ritual as the result of this subduing.]

Ren is mysterious for Zhu Xi because it underlies all the workings of ren. It is the virtue of the original heart-and-mind (ben (?) xin). Thus all the wei ren formulations are explained as giving us a description of the practice of ren. If this is true, however, then Confucius never said anything about ren, which makes sense of one passage [9.1], but leaves us with trouble explaining all the formulations of ren practice which involve other than the mind.

Philosophical Usefulness of Historical Commentary

2007-10-17T10:20:00.000-04:00

I've been spending a lot of time recently thinking about the commentarial tradition surrounding the Analects, and its relevance for our current understanding of the Analects. I agree with John Makeham, who argues that any contemporary interpretation is inevitably indebted to the commentarial tradition. Most western scholars (myself included) first approached the Analects in English translation, and learned its subtle points from others standing in the same tradition. Influential commentaries on the Analects, such as that of Zhu Xi, played a large role in the understandings of the Analects transmitted by our teachers and translations of the text, which are inevitably interpretive (one's hermeneutical stance itself will generally also have been affected by training and tradition).

Given this, a better way to understand what is going on in the Analects, and in other historical texts (especially in ancient China and India, where the commentarial tradition was extremely important), is to examine the commentaries themselves, and investigate the views offered in them. In this way, we can come to see how we developed the views we have on the Analects. We can also discover mistakes in our understandings of the Analects, based on mistakes in the commentarial literature. One such mistake, I argue (an ongoing project, and the basis of an upcoming presentation for an ISWCP panel at the eastern APA this year), is the reading of Confucius' term ren 仁 as a moral property of an individual instantiated by a psychological state. Or, a less contentious formulation--as a moral predicate which can be predicated of an individual in a certain psychological state--x has whatever property 'ren' picks out in virtue of either being in a certain psychological state or having gained the ability to enter into a certain psychological state at will. Even less contentiously--x has the property 'ren' picks out in virtue of having whatever psychological qualities cause x to exhibit certain stable, positive moral patterns of behavior. All of the above formulations, I argue, are incorrect, because they all see ren as being connected to psychological qualities, and individuals.

Confucius sees the criteria for distinguishing ren not as constitutive, but evidential. We can tell that one is ren (speaking loosely here) when one has certain qualities, but it is not the possession of these qualities which makes one ren. So the inevitable question is--what are the constitutive criteria? What is it that makes one ren? Various commentators have offered differing answers to this question--and one influential strain of thought (culminating with Zhu Xi) holds that it is certain psychological qualities that make one ren. This, however, is due, I think, to a misreading of certain key passages in the Analects, and a desire to find in the Analects constitutive criteria, where none are offered. The view of Zhu Xi on many of the key passages is not shared by some earlier commentators of the Analects (arguably Ma Rong, Kong Anguo, and Fan Ning held different views, which are discussed briefly in John Kieschnick's article "Analects 12.1 and the Commentarial Tradition"), and other alternatives are offered. Some of these alternatives are consistent with my own interpretation of ren as a moral property of groups, realized somehow (whether supervenient on, constituted by, whatever) by more tangible social and individual properties.

Part of the mistake, on my view, is that key passages were read by some commentators as offering constitutive criteria of ren. Interpretations on 12.1 are a good example. There, Confucius mentions a way to cultivate ren, by "turning away from oneself" (ke ji 克己) and toward ritual. This is taken by some (including Zhu Xi) to mean that to have eliminated one's desires is (in the constitutive sense) to be ren. There are two key moves going on here. Zhu is both reading 'ji' as the desires or emotions which are implicit in the mind, and reading the wei 為 (here meant as the copula 'is') in "turning away from oneself and toward ritual is ren" (ke ji fu li wei ren 克己復禮為仁) as expressing some kind of identity relation. Both these moves are wrong, I argue, as there is sufficient evidence from the Analects itself to show it.

Anyway, the important point here is that an examination of the commentarial literature can help us, as I think it does in my own case, to trace the historical development of our inherited interpretive views on the Analects, and to discover whether these interpretations are adequate. Lines of interpretation and argument in the commentaries are indispensable if we are to adequately understand the Analects (and other ancient texts). Many of the commentaries to the Analects don't exist in English translation, however, so some of the growing number of philosophers and others working on the Analects (already doing some very important work, by the way) have no access to this invaluable resource. If I had the time, I would work on translating the major commentaries myself--I anticipate translating at least a sizable chunk of it as I work on my dissertation, and perhaps after that's done I can put some effort into translating complete works (at least He Yan, Zhu Xi, Xing Bing, and maybe Huang Kan, all discussed by Makeham). It certainly is a necessary project--so any interested readers, take this as a call to arms. Let's get working on translating those commentaries!

The Dangers of and the Promise of "Comparative Philosophy"

2007-10-09T00:09:00.001-04:00

It has often struck me that philosophers studying the Chinese philosophical tradition have to rethink the “comparative” project in general, which interprets Chinese thought via a theoretical apparatus largely foreign to it, especially in pre-Buddhist thought. Often the comparative project degenerates into one of trying to justify Chinese philosophy to a contemporary western audience by filtering it through interpretive schemes borrowed from “more familiar” western philosophers. Confucius is worth studying, the argument goes, as he is advocating a similar view to that of Aristotle, or Kant, etc. Or, the way to understand Confucius is through a virtue ethical apparatus mainly borrowed from Aristotle and Aquinas. Bryan Van Norden mentions the Thomist synthesis of Christian and Aristotelian thought as inspiration for this method of doing Chinese philosophy. This is, I admit, admirable--to work on such a synthesis between Chinese and western thought—but it is a poor way of doing history of philosophy. Whatever Aquinas was doing, he certainly wasn't trying to better understand Aristotle by interpreting him with a Christian apparatus. And it would have been a mistake to do so. Synthesis can only happen after one adequately understands the pieces to be synthesized. One can't construct a building without wood.

The Chinese tradition, I contend, is not adequately understood on its own terms (by western philosophers) to begin synthesis with western traditions, especially for those outside the field of Chinese philosophy. We do ourselves no favors by jumping into the synthesizing project in order to move out of the “Chinese philosophy ghetto” and into the good graces of the mainstream. The move amounts to moving from the ghetto into the grave. The attitude to this move will inevitably be: “if Confucius is doing Aristotelian virtue ethics and the daoists are worrying about essentialism in metaphysics and philosophy of language, why should we worry about what they had to say—after all, our own tradition has probed and continues to probe those questions. There is nothing new the Chinese philosophers have to offer us.” Of course, this complaint would be wrong-headed, but this is where the “comparative” project as often done today leads.

It reminds me of a similar situation in mainland Chinese philosophy thirty or forty or so years ago (well before my time), when all historical research was filtered through the dominant apparatus of Marxism. The categories of Marxism held ancient Chinese philosophy hostage—every ethical teaching of Confucius had to be thought of in its terms. Of course, Confucius and his students didn't think in terms of Marxism, and so there was something ridiculous about this project. Universal schemes of interpretation which take themselves to “sum up” the acceptable moves on the philosophical playing field inevitably fail us miserably when they confront traditions and theories which appear not to respect their boundaries, or to have different ones altogether. It is when confronted with such traditions that these universal schemes attempt to force the discovered traditions into its own categories, and thereby necessarily misunderstand the tradition. Forcing classical Chinese philosophical thought (and of course this is not monolithic either!) into contemporary western categories thus is no more fruitful for understanding the tradition than was the forcing into Marxist categories.

Thus we have to struggle within the ghetto, we have to interpret, present, and understand Chinese philosophy on its own terms. This, I contend, is the correct way out of the ghetto. Through concentrating on Chinese philosophy and its uniqueness, we can show our philosophical colleagues that indeed something different is going on in Confucius than in Aristotle and Plato and Aquinas, and thereby may come to be seen by our colleagues as deserving a place at the table. Ancient Chinese philosophy will thereby become “relevant”, as offering different alternatives, a different theoretical background through which to understand problems of philosophy. To do this is going to take some measure of “growing up” on the part of philosophers working in Chinese philosophy. Much will have to be done from the outside. For example, only in history and East Asian studies departments can one gain an adequate historical understanding of the Chinese philosophical traditions not filtered through western philosophy. Where there are specialists of Chinese philosophy in the American academy, for example, they tend to be alone, and without the backing and structure that would allow them to bring students up to speed in the Chinese philosophical tradition, language, and culture. This is not so for students of ancient Greek philosophy, modern philosophy, and even medieval European philosophy (though perhaps moreso for Islamic and Jewish Arabic medieval philosophy).

We often have to make the choice between philosophy and Chinese philosophy. My own philosophical training, for example, has made me much more qualified to write on questions of contemporary analytic metaphysics and logic than it has on ancient Chinese philosophy, even though the latter is my specialization. Most of my knowledge of the Chinese philosophical tradition, thus, was self-taught. Almost all of my knowledge of the language, and all of my knowledge of the history was thus gained. The problem, of course, with such philosophical training is that we inevitably tend to think of what we know about the Chinese tradition in terms of the philosophical training we have received, which all but ignores the Chinese tradition (at most western universities, with a few exceptions—Hawaii being a notable one).

At any rate, the philosophical situation of Chinese philosophy thus requires more concentration on the uniqueness of ancient Chinese philosophy, and we must work to point out the shortcomings of some of the “comparative” understandings of the Confucian tradition, especially those using the apparatus of (Aristotelian) virtue ethics to interpret the tradition. At the same time, we must work to build up alternative interpretations of the main strands of the Confucian ethical system, which are much different from any of the western ethical systems on offer--although there are certain places of agreement and meeting.

Is Han Dynasty Philosophy Important?

2007-10-06T21:03:00.000-04:00

This, from Michael Nylan's book "The Five 'Confucian' Classics" (p. 5): "Early classicism has received surprisingly little intellectual attention, and Han studies--the Chinese counterpart to Roman history--continue to languish in relative obscurity." This is sadly true. Part of the reason it is so is summed up in this bit of thinking, by Chad Hansen: "the onset of the philosophical dark age [Qin and Han], brought on by Qin Dynasty repression followed by Han dynasty policies resulted in a bureaucratic, obscurant, Confucian orthodoxy."

I very much enjoy Chad Hansen's work, and think he is in general an excellent philosopher, but he could not be more wrong here. The Han was as far from a philosophical dark age as any, as Nylan argues convincingly in her work. Part of what is disturbing here is that most philosophers seem to assume there is nothing very interesting going on in the Han. Historians, as Nylan points out, are not all that interested in it either, but philosophers tend to hardly even know that the 400 year span of Chinese history that was the Han even happened. Nearly all of the scholars who are doing or have done work on Han philosophers are historians. We philosophers tend to stick to Pre-Qin, or jump much later in time to the Neo-Confucians. More study of the Han is surely necessary. Dong Zhongshu, Yang Xiong, Wang Chong, and Wang Fu alone justify the efforts of many more scholars.

Perhaps some of the work currently underway by the few of us who work on Han philosophy will help things. I'm not too optimistic, though...

Static vs. Dynamic Xing (性)

2007-10-03T12:32:00.000-04:00

I've been looking at the chapters on Huang Kan's (488-545 CE) Lunyu yishu (論語義疏) in John Makeham's book "Transmitters and Creators", and have been thinking a bit about the views Huang presents on xing 性 ("human nature"), and their similarity to some of what Wang Chong says about xing (by the way--a brief plug--my article on Wang's reading of the Analects in the Lunheng is going to appear in this December's Journal of Chinese Philosophy--check it out). More specifically, I have been wondering whether the Huang/Wang view of xing gives us a notion of xing as malleable. Wang's view certainly seems to be that xing is malleable, but it is not so clear we should attribute this view to Huang. The main reason I am interested in this distinction is that it can help us to discover how a theory of mind subtly formed in the Confucian tradition, not all at once, but over a long period. Part of the formation of a theory of mind (one suitable to support an Aristotelian virtue ethical apparatus) in the tradition seems to have been this movement from a dynamic view of xing to a static view of a xing which supports a number of dynamic properties. We see the latter view in Huang Kan.

Because of the static view of xing Huang adopted, he held that xing could not be characterized as good or bad in itself, but was rather prior to moral value. The acts (or what Makeham calls "emotional responses") that are shaped, or "completed" (cheng 成) through environmental factors are what possess moral value, not the xing from which these actions in part arise. Huang is also thus able to hold a view which makes sense of what seem the obvious situationist leanings of certain passages of the Analects like 4.1:

里仁為美。擇不處仁﹐焉得知? "To be in (or live in) the midst of ren is wonderful. If one cannot remain in (the midst of) ren, how can one obtain knowledge? (note--I'm not completely satisfied with this translation, but it will do for my purposes here.)

Huang takes 4.1 to be a situationist statement about those whose xing is ordinary or middle grade. He says of 4.1:

"This chapter shows that it is in the nature of ordinary people to be readily susceptible to influences. When they encounter what is good, they rise; when they meet with what is wrong, they fall. Hence, it is appropriate that one should be careful about where one lives, making sure to select a neighborhood in which humane (ren) people reside." (Makeham translation, p. 103 "Transmitters and Creators")

Thus, one may have a xing of middle grade, that of an ordinary person rather than a sage, and yet by putting oneself in the right situations, produce actions similar to those that would be produced by the sage, or the person who is ren (leave aside my worries about taking ren to be a property of individuals for the moment). One result of this is that one's xing does not have to be malleable in order for there to be the possibility of moral development--cultivation of character relies on external factors as well as inherent properties of individuals.

There are subtle differences between this view and that of Wang Chong. Although Wang and Huang do agree, as Makeham points out, that xing is only one factor in moral development, and that external factors play a much larger role in the determination of one's actions, they disagree on a key point--Wang takes xing to be malleable, and holds that xing can be good or bad at different times (echoing to an extent Dong Zhongshu and Yang Xiong). Ideally, we can control the extent to which it is good or bad, and this makes moral self-cultivation possible.

The move from this popular Han dynasty view to that of Huang, where xing becomes more "substantial", may be a key move in the construction of a theory of mind in the tradition, which, along with apparatus from Buddhism (which also certainly had some influence on Huang!), led to the eventual ascendant psychologism of Zhu Xi, through which much of the contemporary understanding of Confucius is filtered.

Yu Dan's "Little Friend" (小朋友)?

2007-09-12T11:42:00.000-04:00

Here's a good post on Yu Dan's work on Confucius by Alan Baumler at Frog In A Well. I have mixed feelings about Yu Dan's work, as I explain in one of my earlier posts here. It is certainly amazing that Confucius makes it as a bestseller anywhere, but I'm beginning to wonder if it's really Confucius that is making the bestseller lists, or rather some monstrous pop version Confucius' students would not recognize. I think what caused this turn toward skepticism about Yu Dan's project is the revelation (from Baumler) that she "apparently thinks that the term 小人 [xiao ren] means 'child'". Baumler is far too charitable when he calls this "utterly wrong." I would not have been so nice. To interpret the Confucian xiao ren as 'child' is worse than wrong. It's stupid. It illustrates a complete lack of understanding of the classical language and context. I won't attribute this failing to her yet, however--with a charge this great one at least owes the author the benefit of reading her work. I'm going to check out a copy of her 论语心得 (Lunyu xinde), and investigate this charge. I really hope it's not true.

The Resurgence of Confucianism?

2007-07-24T10:38:00.000-04:00

Here's a recent article from the Washington Post on a resurgence of Confucianism in contemporary China.

I find the new interest in Confucius a positive sign for the most part, as Confucianism may be able to temper some of the newfound materialist individualism China is beginning to experience, and which my own culture has been steeped in for some time. However, I am a little skeptical that Confucianism will have the power to transform the society, steering it from greed to morality and human flourishing. My own culture, again, can serve as a historical example here. The mainline Christian churches in the United States and in Europe (especially the Roman Catholic Church) have, for many years, railed against what they see as the increasing individualism and materialism of western culture in general. This, however, has done nothing to stem the tide. As people have become wealthier and more in control of their own lives, they have simply chosen to either leave the churches, or ignore the message. This has led to the decline of the mainline churches and the rise of new churches preaching the "gospel of material success", often megachurches whose sermons appear as seminars on how accepting Jesus can gain one a raise, a better job, and worldly success.

This is to show that public greed and individualism is not so easily tempered through moral teaching, even teaching as radical (in some sense of the word) as Confucianism or Christianity. People with control who are convinced that what they are doing is correct will simply listen to the message and take what they want from it. This is what is happening to Christianity in the west (where one often hears certain Christians make indignant speeches denouncing homosexuality and abortion, while at the same time praising the making of money, opposing social services, and supporting wars), and it is what will inevitably happen to Confucianism in China, as can already be seen though the work of Yu Dan, who herself claims that she has left certain features of Confucius' teaching aside, as they do not fit well with Modern China.

Of course, this is not meant to be a criticism of Yu Dan--I think her work is useful for bringing large numbers of people to some understanding of Confucianism. Her interpretation is not perfect, but this is a sacrifice that must be made in any popularization. It is impossible to retain the full substance of the complicated work of a philosopher such as Confucius when one is trying to present an easy to understand overview of this work. However, there is always a great danger when one begins to stray from the historical, because there is always the temptation (even when attempting to remain historically accurate!) to interpret a tradition as lending support to those motivations one already has and as prizing those things one already wants. However, an ethical tradition interpreted thus loses all its power to transform us. Ethical theories show us the way to be better people--point out for us the path from where we are to where we ought to be. Thus to transform a tradition into a validation of whatever it is we do (unless we're already morally perfect) is to eviscerate it. Anyone who wishes to bring Confucianism into the modern world should keep this in mind.

Yongzheng's Propaganda and Confucius on the "Barbarians"

2007-07-03T20:11:00.000-04:00

Apologies are in order--things have been a bit slow here at Unpolished Jade recently. The reason for this is that I’ve been in the excruciating drive of studying for my comprehensive exams, which I take in August--so I’ve uncharacteristically been spending a great deal of time thinking about things other than Chinese philosophical history. Hopefully this will end sometime in late August However, even with the unending study, I’ve been unable to resist plumbing the historical depths. I’ve been catching up on some modern Chinese history, and reading a few things on the Ming and Qing dynasties. I’ve just finished reading Peter Perdue’s excellent monograph China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Not a great deal of philosophically interesting material covered here, though a must read for those interested in political and military strategy in the late Ming and Qing. One part of the book particularly piqued my interest, however. It had to do (of course) with the Yongzheng emperor’s (reigned 1723-1735 C.E.) reading of Confucius’s Analects, and his interpretation of Analects 3.5. This interpretation served as fuel for his attempt to assert the political supremacy of the Manchu Qing over the Mongol peoples of the central asian frontier, as well as (not focused on by Perdue) over native Han Chinese, whose assumptions of cultural superiority constantly challenged the Qing’s attempt to construct a narrative of natural supremacy. The difficult passage Perdue suggests that Yongzheng alludes to in a passage from the Dayi Juemilu is Analects 3.5:

夷狄之有君不如諸夏之亡也。 Di di zhi you jun bu ru zhu xia xhi wang ye. “The barbarian tribes with a ruler are unlike the Xia states without a ruler.”

The translation I have given above is close to literal, and does not beg any questions about Confucius’ intention in the passage. There are two interpretations of this mentioned by Perdue, however, which conflict in an interesting and very important way. Arthur Waley’s translation of 3.5 takes it to be a statement that the barbarian tribes are in a better state than the Chinese states, and thus serves to chide his listeners for their divergence from the correct ways. The Brooks translate this in what Perdue says is the more traditional way, holding 3.5 to be a claim of Chinese supremacy--that even without a ruler, the barbarian tribes are not equal to the Chinese state. If forced to choose a side, I would side with Waley here, though I think it is far from obvious his is the correct interpretation. In my own translation, I choose to leave the statement ambiguous. This, I think, is the best translation of the passage, although it leaves much to be desired concerning interpretation. However, in translation I prefer to represent the ambiguities inherent in the original Chinese as far as possible in English, as this serves the needs of English readers far better (I think) than over interpretation.

Anyway--the main point of all of this is that Yongzheng seems to have accepted the Waley interpretation as well. He says:

“you cannot divide human from animal on the basis of ‘civilzed’ [Hua] and ‘barbarian’ [Di]. Those who are given rulers by Heaven’s mandate, but try to defy Heaven, cannot avoid being exterminated by Heaven” (Perdue translation, China Marches West, p. 474)

This perhaps was a break with traditional interpretation of this passage of the Analects, but such an interpretation served Yongzheng’s goal of establishing the political supremacy of the Qing. It was, for Yongzheng, powerful (and good?) rulership which established Manchu supremacy and the viability of the Qing. The interpretation of the Brooks would surely have been seen as bordering on subversive by the Manchus, as it implies that they could lead as viable an empire as one led by Han Chinese, such as the Ming (and perhaps this is the reason the Qing struggled with rebellions meant to either reestablish the Ming or drive out the Manchu “invaders”). So although I think Yongzheng’s interpretation gets Confucius right, it went against the grain in his time.

Why do I think Yongzheng and Waley’s interpretation of Analects 3.5 is probably the correct one? Because for Confucius, wen (“culture”) alone was not sufficient to achieve the thriving society. This is why he constantly stressed good rulership, which we can take to be one of the main themes (if not the main theme) of the Analects. Wen was certainly, for Confucius, one of the ways a person comes to learn how to be a good ruler, and it is necessary for a knowledge of the ritual action through which one connects with the community at large and focuses one’s moral intentions into social action. However, much of being ren (“humane,”) itself has to do with motivation, and this cannot be withheld from even those without access to wen. On many occasions in the Analects, however, Confucius bemoans of the lack of concern of those around him, and even his students, with ren and right action in general. In this context, Analects 3.5 can be seen as such a complaint. Even those without wen can try, Confucius might say--their hearts can be in the right place--and when they are, they are better than those within “civilization” are in Confucius’ era. It is important to keep in mind that Confucius did not have a high opinion of the society of his time. It was the Zhou that Confucius looked to as the ideal, not the “civilization” of his own time. He would not have had reason to praise the “states of the Xia”, and this would certainly not be keeping with Confucius’ tendency elsewhere in the Analects to prod and criticize where he finds faults, rather than make excuses, saying the equivalent of “well, you’re not on the right path, but no matter what you do, you’re better than those awful barbarians.”

We Are, Most Essentially, Consumers?

2007-03-28T11:33:00.001-04:00

This is sad. Look what we've become. I can't help but think that most of us in old age will look back on our lives in despair, seeing only ads and money and consumption, and a dark, bottomless void where something substantial and life giving should have been. Could Confucius have anticipated something like this? I suppose he would just say this is a natural result of a myopic focus on the self, and a slavish attachment to our goods. Maybe we could all use a good shot of the Confucian virtues--filiality, devotion, respect, humanity or benevolence, and reverence for social welfare.

Why Does the West Consider Confucianism a Religion?

2007-03-23T01:11:00.000-04:00

I've thought about this question a bit recently. It has always baffled me. It seemed to me (and still does) a key example of the misunderstandings inevitable in the meeting of different cultures. I constantly see “Confucianism” referred to as a religion, yet never see anyone identify themselves as an adherent of the Confucian religion. When I first encountered the philosophical system of the Analects, Mencius, Xunzi, and the Neo-Confucians, I found nothing that led me to believe this tradition could justifiably be called a religion. Today, having studied Confucius and the Confucian tradition in general for about a decade, I still have not found any justification for taking the Confucian tradition to represent a religion, similar to religious systems such as Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, etc.

Assuming that I am right, that Confucianism is not a religion (any more than Platonism, Stoicism, or Epicureanism), then we are confronted with the question: how did the west get things so wrong? How did it become standard to classify Confucianism as a religion?

Perhaps a look at the Christian presence in China from the 16^th through the 18^th century can give us the beginnings of an answer. I have been reading Jonathan Spence's wonderful book The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (I recommend it to anyone with an interest in the history of the encounter between China and west). The Jesuit missionaries of Ricci's time seem to have been greatly concerned with presenting an opposition between the three Semitic religions of the west: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam; and what they saw as the three main “religious” systems of China: Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. To a large extent, this tripartite Chinese system of thought may have been an invention of western missionaries, created in order to make the comparison with western thought and its divisions. Perhaps Buddhism and certain facets of Daoism could have been justifiably considered religious systems, but Buddhism and Daoism alone would not give missionaries the desired contrast to the western scheme. Confucianism, then, as an elite philosophical movement of the literati, which included (or rather subsumed or assumed) certain ceremonial and devotional elements, was available to serve as this missing third system.

Initially it seems strange that a society familiar with the work of Plato and the neo-Platonists, whose systems had ceremonial and devotional elements as well, would take Confucianism to be a religious system, while withholding this status from Platonism or neo-Platonism. However, when we consider the motivation of the Christian missionaries, things become a bit clearer. Confucianism, as a foundational doctrine within Chinese society, must have presented itself as a challenge to the missionaries, who saw the doctrine of the Catholic Church as what should ultimately play this role. A Christian Chinese society could not be built on the back of an ideology which assumed no creator God and grounded its ethical system in humanity rather than in the divine. Such a doctrine would, the Church believed, cause problems for the introduction of Christianity, and might well lead even Chinese converts to begin creating new heresies, which would make it easy for the Church to lose doctrinal control of the vast empire. This may have been behind the decision of Pope Clement XI in 1715 to side with the Dominicans over the Jesuits in the controversy over whether Chinese rituals were compatible with Catholicism. The rituals of paying homage to ancestors may have looked suspiciously like worship to the Catholic Church (which stuck us with another misunderstanding of Chinese culture in the term “ancestor worship”), and this would have been incompatible with the worship of the One True God.

The first two sections of Clement XIs decree seem to suggest this:

“I. The West calls Deus [God] the creator of Heaven, Earth, and everything in the universe. Since the word Deus does not sound right in the Chinese language, the Westerners in China and Chinese converts to Catholicism have used the term "Heavenly Lord" for many years. From now on such terms as "Heaven" and "Shang-ti" should not be used: Deus should be addressed as the Lord of Heaven, Earth, and everything in the universe. The tablet that bears the Chinese words "Reverence for Heaven" should not be allowed to hang inside a Catholic church and should be immediately taken down if already there.

II. The spring and autumn worship of Confucius, together with the worship of ancestors, is not allowed among Catholic converts. It is not allowed even though the converts appear in the ritual as bystanders, because to be a bystander in this ritual is as pagan as to participate in it actively.”

from China in Transition, 1517-1911, Dan. J. Li, trans. pp. 22-24

This opposition to Chinese rituals on the part of the Church (fostered by the Dominicans) may be due to the fact that the Chinese terminology and practices named above predate the entrance of Christianity to China, and even the Christian religion itself. Thus, a perceived historical distance from Christianity, even for its practical similarities, may have contributed to the rejection of ritual (an integral part of Confucian ethics) by the Catholic Church.

Such a view was likely fostered by a lack of understanding of Chinese culture, and a rush to impose the principles of the Church which blinded many to the culture of those to be converted. Among the Jesuits, who spent time gaining a foothold in China, a more sophisticated view of philosophical systems in the region grew. We can see this in Ricci's own case, in his change from a simplistic and misinformed view of Chinese culture at the start of his China mission, to a more nuanced view. Spence writes of this transformation:

“The major shift in Ricci's perception of relative social status in China was rather slow in coming. In his first assessment, made after he had been in China about one year, he concluded that there were three religions of major significance in China, those of the Confucian literati, the Buddhists, and the Taoists. [...] A year later, in October 1585, as he wrote General Acquaviva, he had realized that the question was more complex: in essence, the Chinese literati could be considered as holding a cluster of beliefs similar to those of the Epicureans in the ancient Greek world...”

from The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, p. 116

Perhaps due to the Church's decision in the rites controversy, the west has retained, down to the present day, the naïve early view of Matteo Ricci. Most non-specialists have thus not gained the benefit of learning from Ricci's mature view, as we specialists have largely not insisted on forcing the matter, probably because none of us are badly misinformed about the status of Confucianism in Chinese thought or take the early Ricci view seriously.

Perhaps this can help explain why the mistaken view that Confucianism is a religion persists in the west today.

What Kind of Ru Are You, Anyway?

2006-11-18T13:21:00.000-05:00

Analects 6.13 reads:
子謂子夏曰：「女為君子儒！無為小人儒！」

TRANSLATION: The master said to Zigong: "Act as a junzi-like scholar, not as a petty scholar."

This is a very interesting passage for the interpretation of ru (scholar). Nicholas Zufferey's monograph "To the Origins of Confucianism" on the subject of the early ru scholars is a very useful study on this topic. We see here from 6.13 that the ru, although a class of scholars Confucius and his students belonged to, was not unified in virtue. In Confucius's day, the ru were scholars of many types, generally instructing the sons of rulers and other nobles in wen, which of course included literature and knowledge of ritual. Ru was not at that time equated with "Confucian", as it later came to be (Confucianism was classified as the ru jia). Confucius is here exhorting Zigong to be a ru with a mind for cultivation of virtue. This assumes that there were ru who cared nothing about virtue (or very little about it). Such ru were probably most concerned with the money to be made in instructing the sons of rulers, and possibly the power one might gain as an advisor to a ruler. One example of such power, quite a bit after Confucius's time, is that gained by Li Si under Qin Shi Huang. The "legalist" scholars such as Li Si and Han Feizi could be classified as ru (and probably were), although their philosophical views clearly show no concern with Confucian virtue, at least as it is usually understood (I have some reason to think the legalists were much more Confucian than they seem--more on this later).

Confucius seems to say in 6.13 that what distinguishes one as a junzi is not simply high scholarship (though this may be a necessary condition, I'm not sure), but a moral quality that the scholar can cultivate. This leaves open the interesting question as to whether non-ru can cultivate the necessary moral qualities to be a junzi--a topic that requires much more attention than I can give it here. There's actually a great deal that hangs on this for our understanding of Confucian ethics. If only the ru can be junzi, or only people whose level of education comes near that of the ru (perhaps people taught as youth by ru) can be junzi, than we have an aristocratic ethics that looks much like what Aristotle proposed in his Nicomachean Ethics. Alternatively, if a non-ru or uneducated person can become a junzi, than it seems that there is something more "egalitarian" going on here. I imagine some interpreters might want to press the more egalitarian interpretation of Confucius (as did H.G. Creel in his Confucius: The Man and the Myth), but I suspect something more like Aristotelian elitism is going on here. Of course, in Aristotle's case, this ethical elite are of necessity affluent Greeks of good families. For Confucius, to be a junzi does not require accident of birth, but education, adherence to ritual, and concern for the social project. Thus Confucius's elite (who he thinks ought to govern the state) takes the form of a "meritocracy". However, Confucius does not, I think, believe that everyone has the ability to become a junzi--nor does everyone have the ability to become educated. He might even claim that not everyone who is educated, or is a ru, has the ability to become a junzi. Perhaps some ru by their very nature are barred from the ability to cultivate virtue in the way Confucius suggests. Of course, this is starting to go beyond anything one glean from the text of the Analects alone.

Confucius's challenge in 6.13 is an interesting one, anyway--especially for those of us who, much like the ancient ru, make our living by studying, thinking, and teaching the youth. We ought to go beyond just this and cultivate virtue as well. You won't get any grants for doing it, and it won't really improve the CV. But we ought to strive to be junzi-like ru, rather than petty ru, and this way we might ultimately be more successful in our pursuits, as well as playing a role in bringing about a thriving society.

Interpretation--Historical or Creative?

2006-11-04T22:06:00.000-05:00

John Makeham, in his 2003 Transmitters and Creators, argues that the attempt by some scholars to make Confucius relevant to contemporary concerns without study of the main Chinese commentaries and commentarial traditions on the Analects is a mistake. Although I am certainly in agreement that we should worry about the historical context of the Analects in Chinese society after the 5th century BCE, I disagree with Makeham that the project of bypassing the commentarial tradition and working directly from the Analects for interpretation is not useful. It seems to me that both projects would be desirable in the ideal situation (if every academic were a sinologist or philosopher). Granted, the ideal situation does not hold, and thus we might have a healthy discussion over which project (the historical project or the creative project) should take precedence--but it still seems that the creative project is not prima facie undesirable. One could argue that the Chinese commentarial traditions have affected our own interpretations of the Analects, whether we're aware of it or not (infecting us through our teachers, who got it from their teachers, and so forth...), but this situation is not essentially different from that of Zhu Xi, He Yan, or any of the other Chinese commentators (ancient or modern), many of whom attempted to give their own interpretations of the Analects free of close analysis of the commentarial tradition as it existed at their time. We can't avoid the fact that each commentator on the Analects attempted to interpret the text so as to make it relevant to their social and political situation, and these considerations were often separate from historical concerns. This fact is part of what makes the commentarial literature so interesting, as it is far from uniform. If this is so, however, then such projects should be as important today, as we ourselves may become part of the living Confucian tradition. If we see the Analects and the Confucian tradition(s) in general as historians, we may end up looking at it as antiquarians. This is certainly important (especially in academia), but there is also a central place (also in academia) for creative and approaches to interpretation of the Analects and other important ancient texts.

He Knows Where The Ford Is

2006-10-16T18:12:00.000-04:00

In Edward Slingerland's translation of the Analects, he mentions Ma Rong's commentary on 18.6, the passage in which, in answer to Zilu's request (from Confucius) for directions to a particular ford, a daoist-like figure says to Zilu that Confucius "should know where the ford is." (是知津矣！). About this passage, Ma Rong claims that it is because Confucius is known to travel widely around the countryside to advise rulers and ministers in various states that the daoist-like figure takes a swipe at him with this snide remark.

It occurs to me that there is probably more to it than that. Although I agree that Ma Rong's analysis is the correct surface reading of the passage, I think this is meant to illustrate something different, a deeper perceived disagreement (by Confucians) between Confucian-inclined and Daoist-inclined people. Given the Confucian claim that the right way to live is by following and instilling in society the Li ("Ritual") of the Zhou kings, coming to know the right thing to do is (in some sense) coming to know the Zhou li, and thus there is a sense in Confucius that knowledge is a grasping and following of things already revealed, that is, available "collective knowledge".

For the daoist (especially Zhuangzi--and as Slingerland notes, the use of descriptive names for the daoist-like characters in Analects 18.5-18.7 seems to suggest these passages were written after the Zhuangzi, perhaps in response), we cannot gain full knowledge of dao ("the way") by looking to the past, because the dao is not limited by what we might call the "collective knowledge of humanity." Dao is not something humans once attained and then lost. It is contingent on each person to reconcile themselves with the state of nature, or natural propensities, in order to follow dao. Since natural propensities are always changing, the daoist sage is always on his toes, so to speak.

In contrast to this, the Confucian conception of ethical knowledge seems static (or, in a more positive light, stable), and so the response "he should know where the ford is" might be taken as a statement of a Zhuangzi-type daoist's problem with Confucians; namely, that Confucians are to them "know-it-alls", presumptuous scholars who think that the Zhou li in some way exemplifies human knowledge. So the quote "he should know where the ford is" might be seen as a glove to the face. Another way the quote may have been written, to make the same point: "If all one needs to know is the ancient ways, why does Confucius need to ask me anything? What knowledge can he gain from me? He should already know all there is to know, right?"

If this interpretation of 18.6 is right, then it begins to look like these "Confucius responds to daoists" passages in Book 18 are less biased toward Confucius than they seem. Instead, perhaps they try to lay out the debate between the camps, even if in the end their representation of the daoist is still a bit straw-mannish. Of course, a Confucian couldn't be expected to present daoist concerns as fairly or forcefully as someone like Zhuangzi

Analects 1.7--Learning Is Well Established Virtue

2006-08-30T15:01:00.000-04:00

(1.7)
子夏曰：「賢賢易色；事父母，能竭其力；事君，能致其身；與朋友交，言而有信。雖曰未學，吾必謂之學矣。」

TRANSLATION:
Zixia said: “It is like this with the worthy person who changes (what they think of) appearances-- In attending to their father and mother, they are able to exhaust their energy. In doing the business of their ruler, they are able to devote their person. In interactions with friends, they speak and are trustworthy. It is said such people are not learned, but I would definitely call them learned.

COMMENTARY:
This is a difficult passage to translate. First of all, there is the xian xian yi se at the beginning of the passage, which could mean a number of different things. I think there is much agreement, though, that it generally refers to sageliness (whether one who is a sage or one who wants to become one) that turns away from se. The particulars of the translation are not so important as long as the translation accounts for this. Another difficulty of translation is the distinction between li and shen, as the passage says that one should exhaust li for parents and give shen for the ruler. Li is translated here as "energy", and I think this is unproblematic. But the way to translate shen when li is already translated as "energy"? This is hard. Literally, it should probably be "body", but doubtlessly an English translation would sound strange which read "they are able to devote their bodies". The connections contemporary readers would make here are, I think, absent from the set of connections ancient Chinese readers would have made to this.

A couple of points on the philosophy here. Here is a very blunt statement that learning includes cultivation of virtue, rather than simply knowledge of facts. Both are necessary for Confucius--one must know what the right way to be is, but this knowledge is only useful in that one can then cultivate virtues in oneself, as the goal of Confucius's teachings is to create people who are junzi rather than simply to inform us what the junzi is, similar to the goal of a tennis coach, to create great tennis players, rather than simply impart the information about what it is to be a good tennis player. A good coach should be able to do both, and a good student should be able to become a good player. For Confucius, one is not a good ethicist without being a good person. If we fail to live in the right kind of ways ourselves, we cannot be said to have learned much about the right ways to live, and we are certainly not qualified to teach others this. Of course, this has to be qualified--Confucius may have thought that no one could (or at least no one has) become a completely good person, a sheng ren ("sage") along the lines of Yao and Shun. He even denied that he himself had been able to cultivate the virtues he prized as well as he would have liked. Still, at least some level of goodness must be necessary in order to be said to be learned and be qualified to teach. Perhaps we need to at least be junzi. Is it good enough to simply (seriously) aspire to be junzi? Of course, aspiration here must include some amount of effort--we would readily deny that one really aspires to be a junzi if that person puts forth little effort to become a junzi. Hmmm...

Analects 1.6--Culture As A Source Of Morality

2006-08-18T12:15:00.000-04:00

(1.6) 子曰：「弟子入則孝，出則悌，謹而信，汎愛眾，而親仁。行有餘力，則以學文。」

TRANSLATION:
The master said: "The brotherly son is filial when he enters, deferential when he leaves. Respectful and trustworthy, he widely cares for the multitude, and holds ren close. If after this he has remaining energy, he devotes it to studying wen."

COMMENTARY:
Nothing surprising in the first part of this passage. Confucius tells us that the good person (in this case, the di zi ("brotherly son") acts in such a way that ren is cultivated in himself and the society. Note here that Confucius is not talking about the junzi. Is the di zi a junzi? The attributes Confucius here gives to the di zi are much like those he gives to the junzi in other passages. Maybe then we should see this as a claim that being a brotherly son is one way to be a junzi. Maybe it is a necessary condition. This passage would not have sounded odd if di zi were exchanged for junzi. This would be following what Confucius has already told us in 1.2, that filiality and brotherliness is the root of ren. One who is a di zi has established this root.

The second part of the passage is interesting--the di zi devotes any extra energy to studying wen ("culture", "literature"). If we take wen to be "culture", specifically, for Confucius, the Zhou culture which he looks to for instruction, then we can see that there is some link between the di zi and this culture. It looks like the di zi is enriched by study of culture, as this fortifies the virtues the di zi already possesses, and helps to refine these virtues further. The main goal is the cultivation of these virtues Confucius mentions, which seem to coincide with holding ren close by (does this mean ren is an emergent property arising when one has a certain collection of virtues? Or is it that the person with certain virtues will generally also hold ren close?). What contributes most to that project is a study of culture (with "culture" here thought of not in the broad sense of contemporary anthropology, but in the sense of ideal culture or high culture--that is, "culture" in the sense that we say one who has studied the Homeric epics is "cultured". Culture in Confucius's sense carries with it a moral value. Culture is a good--that which we might call "culture" but is either morally neutral or immoral, take brutal elements of our own or other cultures, for example, would not count as wen for Confucius. Wen is an ethical term for Confucius. This is one of the key social notions in Confucianism, one of the places it seems to differ from much western philosophy, in which the ethical focus is much more on the individual. Confucius says here, as in other places, that the source of morality is society, the ideal society, which grounds our ethical pursuits.

Gandhi on Violence in the Bhagavad Gita

2006-07-25T03:47:00.000-04:00

I've recently been collecting notes and reading some commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita. One interesting commentary that I started reading last month is Gandhi's interpretation. Before I opened this book, my first pressing question was what he would say about what seemed to me to be a central theme of the Gita--that it was Arjuna's sacred duty as a ksatriya to engage in violence. Given Gandhi's doctrine of non-violence, I wondered how he would reconcile the violence advocated in the Gita (where Krishna recommends that Arjuna fight his relatives in war, because it is his sacred duty) with his own non-violent position.

What Gandhi says is that the Gita is largely symbolic, and the central battle which the dialogue centers around is one of the most potent of the symbols of the Gita. He says that the war of Arjuna against his relatives is meant to symbolize the war within each of us against those elements of our characters or minds that we are very attached to, but are ultimately detrimental to the performance of our sacred duty, or somehow impede our understanding of the truth about all action (that inaction within action, or "discipline" is the key to realizing the "infinite spirit", brahman).

Is this right? Are we to read the Gita (or at least the part of it dealing with violence) as only a symbol for struggles within? The distinction of four castes is definitely not meant only as symbolic, as the society within which the Gita was written adhered to this scheme, containing these four castes. One of those castes was (and still is, though this does not mean as much today as it did in the time of the Gita) the kshatriya class, of which Arjuna was a member. It is supposed to be the duty of this class to serve as rulers and warriors. So, even if the war situation in the Gita (and I suppose in the Mahabharata as a whole) was meant to be symbolic, the adherents of the religious and philosophical system represented by the Gita would have to admit that there are times when violence is religiously justified--namely, those times when kshatriyas are called to exert force to defend society. If it were the case that such force were never justified (as Gandhi seemed to think, though I'm not sure on his exact position), then why would there exist a divinely sanctioned class of people whose task it is to exert such force, unless something morally wrong was divinely sanctioned? I guess in this way Gandhi's problem turns into the problem of evil.

This leaves me to wonder, is Gandhi's position consistent with the Gita?

Compassion and the End of Suffering

2006-07-23T03:42:00.000-04:00

It's been a long time since I posted here last--I'm way overdue. However, I'm glad to say that I haven't been away so long because of laziness. My son Siddhartha was born on July 8, and Tara and I have been dealing with long, sleepless nights with a screaming infant. Lots of fun. Now I'm staying up late nights, though, to let Tara get some sleep, so I finally have some time to get back into things.

I've also launched into a couple of new projects, that I'm working on along with my preparations to teach non-western philosophy in the fall. I've begun a fictional work after a long absence, which is closely enough related to the subject matter of this blog to mention here. I have started a semi-fictional account of the story of the Buddha, from his late youth as prince of the Sakyans to the first of his teachings as the Buddha. This story has always been one that has interested me (as it has many others through the centuries), and I think I may finally have enough skill (though perhaps only barely) as a writer to give it a shot.

Along with this project, and to an extent informing it, is a reading of the Theravada suttas, some of which I plan to make some comments on (that I might post here). Of course, the Analects project is still going (also to be posted here), but I figure that including the suttas is a good way to mix things up. One difference between the sutta commentaries I will give and my Analects commentary is my grasp of the original languages. My classical Chinese knowledge is many times better than my knowledge of Pali, which is pretty weak, so I'll be depending mainly on English translation for the sutta commentaries (with perhaps a little sprinkling of the original Pali text, where I can understand it or it's important enough to consult Warder and/or the PTS Dictionary).

So, I have no commentary right now--but I would like to post this sutta, the Karaniya Metta Sutta (Bhikkhu Thanissaro's translation), from the Sutta Nipata. This sutta is the essence of compassion. Reflecting on it, maybe we can cultivate the compassion (metta, often translated "loving kindness") to live the good life. (Although karuna rather than metta is more often translated as compassion, I think that metta is an important element of our notion of compassion. Our word compassion probably contains what are three separate concepts in Pali Buddhism, karuna, metta, and mudita ["sympathetic joy"])

This is to be done by one skilled in aims
who wants to break through to the state of peace:
Be capable, upright, & straightforward,
easy to instruct, gentle, & not conceited,
content & easy to support,
with few duties, living lightly,
with peaceful faculties, masterful,
modest, & no greed for supporters.

Do not do the slightest thing
that the wise would later censure.

Think: Happy, at rest,
may all beings be happy at heart.
Whatever beings there may be,
weak or strong, without exception,
long, large,
middling, short,
subtle, blatant,
seen & unseen,
near & far,
born & seeking birth:
May all beings be happy at heart.

Let no one deceive another
or despise anyone anywhere,
or through anger or irritation
wish for another to suffer.

As a mother would risk her life
to protect her child, her only child,
even so should one cultivate a limitless heart
with regard to all beings.
With good will for the entire cosmos,
cultivate a limitless heart:
Above, below, & all around,
unobstructed, without enmity or hate.
Whether standing, walking,
sitting, or lying down,
as long as one is alert,
one should be resolved on this mindfulness.
This is called a sublime abiding
here & now.

Not taken with views,
but virtuous & consummate in vision,
having subdued desire for sensual pleasures,
one never again
will lie in the womb.

Confucian Legalism, Part 2

2006-07-03T19:43:00.000-04:00

Here's a fun site where you can take a small quiz and it tells you which "Chinese philosophy" you are most in agreement with. It's kind of silly, as the questions it asks are fairly cariacturish, but it's neat to predict what your results will show. The reason I bring this up is because my results showed that I am most sympathetic with Confucianism, second most with legalism, and least with daoism (there are only three systems represented). Of course, I already knew that I favor Confucianism and Legalism, and I am continuing to search texts and interpreters to see to what extent these overlap. What interested me, and continues to interest me, is the moral side-effects of legalist thinking. Adam Smith argued that the profit motive in capitalism indirectly benefits all the members of society. Likewise, I think something similar may be said for legalist methods of running the state. A tempered legalism, one in which the main goal of the ruler is wealth and power, may defy some of the lack of concern Han Feizi seemed to have with morality. Confucius seemed to hold that the most powerful state was the most moral state--the ruler who ruled benevolently, through dao ("right action"), which must be involved with ren ("humanity", for lack of a better term), would thereby become the ruler with the most powerful state. At least in terms of motivation, there seems to clearly be some overlap between thinkers like Confucius and Han Feizi.

Analects 1.5--Morality as a Political Expedient

2006-07-03T16:35:00.000-04:00

(1.5) 子曰：「道千乘之國，敬事而信，節用而愛人，使民以時。」

TRANSLATION: The master said: "The right way (dao) to run a thousand chariot state is: to conduct(the state's) business with respect and trustworthiness; be reserved in use of the people and care for them; cause the people to use their time well.

COMMENTARY: This is, I think, the first really difficult passage of the Analects. The difficulty of this passage is not philosophical, however--most of the problem here comes in the grammar and the translation. In fact, as far as philosophical content, I find this passage to be less robust than many of Confucius's (although there are certainly some interesting issues raised which I'll touch on below, especially with respect to political expediency).

GRAMMATICAL ISSUES--
The first difficulty encountered in this passage is just how to translate the two er fragments in the center of the sentence. The first is jing shi er xin, which I've translated as "to conduct business with respect and trustworthiness", and the second is jie yong er ai ren, which I've translated as "be reserved in the use of people and care for them". These can be translated another way as well, depending on what role we take the er to be playing here. One might read it as I have, or read it so the translation is "to conduct business with respect and be trustworthy" for the first, which is not so different from my translation other than that trustworthiness (xin) is an adverbial modifier of "conducting business" in my translation, and not in this version. In the second, the translation of er as a conjunction of two complete clauses makes it read "use (things or resources) reservedly and care for the people." This makes a great difference from my reading of the er as a conjunction of two verbs. There is one main reason that I translate the passage the way I do. If the conjunction of complete clauses is what the two er in this passage are doing, I think we should expect them not to be there. Instead of using er, it seems the style of the writing in the Analects to extract an er when unnecessary, so that the passage would read: jing shi, xin, jie yong, ai ren instead of jing shi er xin, jie yong er ai ren.

PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES--
As I intimate in the title of this post, I think 1.5 is meant as a lesson that political expediency is served by actions which are for the most part those of a junzi, a good person. A thriving and powerful state can be brought about through following actions which are for the benefit of the people of the state, rather than directly for the benefit of the ruler. Part of the hint here is that the ruler will gain indirectly through the welfare of the people. The correct way to run and keep a large and powerful state (hence the introductory "state of a thousand chariots", which would have been a wealthy state in Confucius's time) is to rule in such a way that things follow the correct moral order, in such a way that the people of the state thrive. If one cares for the people, one will not break the backs of the people for frivolous things (such as the later Qin emperor's building of the Great Wall or the inordinate taxing and working of the people on state projects). Although this, Confucius would contend, is the right way to act, part of the reason it is the right way to act is because it is politically expedient--that is, it is conducive to building and retaining a powerful state. The legalists will take political expediency as the number one priority, and they will have some different things to say about it than what Confucius says, but I see this as leading in the direction of the legalists. One key difference here is that actions we would for the most part consider as "good" actions serve as a political expedient for Confucius. Does Confucius think that this is the reason they are good? I contend that Confucius holds that these actions are good for a number of reasons, one of which is their expediency. As I have said elsewhere, I believe that for Confucius, the thriving society is the ground of morality, and as such, anything that leads to the thriving society is a good action. Part of a thriving society is surely wealth and power (though Confucius would disagree with Han Feizi that wealth and power are enough). Thus, it is not only an action's conduciveness to the wealth and power of society that makes an action good, but it is a necessary condition for the goodness of an action. Note that the action doesn't have to be foolproof--that is, it doesn't inevitably have to bring about a wealthy and powerful state, it only needs to be conducive to bringing about such a state, in much the same way that we claim that eating fruits and vegetables are conducive to health, even though one may eat them and still be unhealthy. The component of success is unnecessary, even though it is the goal of the project. This is partly because one cannot control external forces. Despite one's best efforts, the tide is often against one, and the most junzi-like of their actions will fail to bring about positive change. Thus it is necessary to morality for Confucius that we not worry about results so much, as this will damage our moral motivation, our willingness to try to bring about the thriving society.

Analects 1.4

2006-06-24T00:59:00.000-04:00

(1.4) 曾子曰：「吾日三省吾身─為人謀而不忠乎？與朋友交而不信乎？傳不習乎？」

TRANSLATION: Master Zeng said: "Daily I inspect myself in three regards: for others have I done my utmost? In my engagement with friends have I not been trustworthy? Have I not practiced what I've been taught?"

COMMENTARY: not much to say abouyt this one. I just ought to point out the word zhong here (I've translated it "doing one's utmost" following Ames and Rosemont), as this is an important concept in the Analects, and causes massive headaches in the context of 4.15 (the "one strand" passage). Also, notice the xi (practice) in the last part of this passage, marking the practical element of Confucian thought, which must be kept in mind. We tend (myself included) to get carried away sometimes with interpretations of Confucius that make him too theoretical, more concerned with theory than he was. In fact, the divide between theory and practice would not have been one Confucius recognized. Though I think there may be a somewhat similar division, in Confucius's distinction between learning (xue) and cogitating (si). (See Analects 2.15--「學而不思則罔，思而不學則殆。」) One of the projects I plan to pursue is a study of how close si comes to "theory" both in our contemporary sense of the word, as well as the ancient greek theoria. I suspect there are some parallels, but not a ton. Understanding the differences though might help us to understand the difference between xue and si.

Short Rant on History and Philosophy

2006-06-09T15:22:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking a bit about history lately, so I thought I'd chime in here, since this blog is dedicated to history of asian philosophy. For years and years (and still today), history of philosophy is something one can learn in a philosophy department (For example, I'm a PhD student in a philosophy department, focusing on history of philosophy). However, as I've seen history of philosophy done at the various universities I've been involved with, the "history" part of history of philosophy often is neglected. Sure, we are concerned somewhat with the time in which a particular philosopher wrote, and the contemporaries with which that philosopher argued, but we are sadly not as concerned with this as we should be. A good historian-of-philosphy should ideally be a good philosopher and a good historian. A weakness on one side or the other will lead to odd interpretations. A philosopher with no head for history will end up reading interpretations into historical texts which make the philosopher sound like he or she is doing contemporary philosophy. A historian with no philosophy background will do a great job at seeing a philosopher as a result of their cultural and intellectual background, but will do little as far as reconstructing a coherent interpretation of the philosopher's positions.

Maybe this means all of us who focus on history of philosophy should be forced to take degrees in philosophy and history together.

Analects 1.3

2006-06-02T11:34:00.000-04:00

Man oh man. I'm finally back from my pseudo-vacation, and I'm trying to get back to work now. I promise I'll be faster with my delivery of the Analects translation and commentary. I want to get at least through Book 6 or 7 by the end of the summer. Of course, I'm going to throw some other things on this page as well, especially as I begin to worry a bit more about Legalism, later Confucianism and the Han dynasty. But for now, here's Analects 1.3:

(1.3) 子曰：「巧言令色，鮮矣仁！」

TRANSLATION:
The master said: "Eloquent words and a commanding visage do not often (indicate one as) ren."

COMMENTARY:
First, some explanation of my choices in translation. Ling se might be taken as "insinuating appearance" as Ames and Hall translate it, or as "ingratiating manner" as Slingerland renders it, which is close to Lau's "ingratiating face." I chose to use the "command" sense of ling because I think it lends to my sense of ren as an ideal social order rather than as "benevolence", in the Mencian sense. Goodness and ren are surely not seperate, but it seems to me that having an "authoritative" stance is a key component of ren, which Ames and Rosemont seem to hold in their translation generally. This is why I am a bit confused that they translate ling se as "insinuating appearance". If ren is "authoritative conduct" (as Ames and Rosemont translate it), then it seems more plausible that ling be given my translation of "commanding". We might easily mistake someone who has a commanding appearance for being an "authoritative" person--one whose conduct is exemplary and who keeps steady control over every aspect of his or her life. Anyway, enough about this linguistic quibble.

There is another interesting problem in 1.3. Should we read the last section, the xian yi ren as marking accompaniment or indication? That is, is it that eloquent words and a commanding visage rarely accompany ren, or that they rarely indicate that one is ren (as I have above). This is an important distinction, because if the former is true, then it looks like eloquence and having a commanding visage are good indicators that one is not ren. If the latter is true, it may be that many people who are ren may also speak eloquently and have commanding appearances, but these traits have no necessary connection with ren, and thus cannot be used to spot those who are ren. Thus, though one may have these properties, they do not have them insofar as they are ren, that is, it is not their being ren that makes them have these properties. Of course, the passage could admit of both readings, in that such properties do not often accompany ren, and thus are not good indicators of ren. However, I think that Confucius would not have wanted to say that commanding appearance and eloquent words are incompatible with ren. If we read xian yi ren as "do not often (accompany) ren" it seems that we should take the xian as a rhetorical device to mean something closer to "never" than to "rarely" (which is a more literal translation). We can see in 1.2 that xian is used in this rhetorical manner. We have a similar tool in contemporary English ("you're rarely going to see Jim being honest"...)

Thus, I think we should see Confucius as making the claim that there is no necessary connection between eloquent speech and commanding appearance and ren. After all, there is room in Confucius's ethical system for various character types, many of which can be subsumed under ren or dao, as we see in 1.2.

Analects 1.2

2006-05-24T15:26:00.000-04:00

Finally--moving along. I've been away from home for the past few days, so I haven't had so much time to post. At this rate, it will take me the rest of my life to get through the Analects. So I'm going to pick it up. I'll have much more time once I get back to Connecticut (I'm in vacation mode now), but a little bit of Analects is always good, even on vacation. So here's 1.2.

有子曰：「其為人也孝弟，而好犯上者，鮮矣；不好犯上，而好作亂者，未之有也。君子務本，本立而道生。孝弟也者，其為仁之本與！」

TRANSLATION: Youzi said: "Those who are filial and brotherly (toward others) but also enjoy committing offenses against their superiors are few (indeed). Those who don't enjoy committing offenses against their superiors but (go about) creating disorder are non-existent. The junzi attends to the root. When the root is established, right action grows therefrom. Those who are filial and brotherly are getting at the root of humane behavior!"

COMMENTARY: okay, time to defend this seemingly odd translation. The translation I give here is not literal, but that's alright, I think. In one of my earlier posts, I mention that we ought to make translations in general that are as close to literal as possible, but my goal here on this reading of the Analects is to give a rich interpretation--so I'm admitting right up front that these translations will be mostly interpretive. Therefore, I would not recommend them for someone with no previous knowledge of the Analects (I don't want to beg the question against different intepretations).

So--the part of this passage that has struck me as the most interesting is the ben li er dao sheng bit, and it is just this bit that I have translated in a very interpretive way. A more literal translation of this would be "When the root is established, the way is born", but I've translated it "when the root is established, right action grows therefrom." Allow me to explain. I think that dao thought of as "right action" gives insight into Analects 15.29, which has to me always been one of the more problematic Analects passages (as it has been for some others), but which I now think is one of the more interesting and useful passages in the Analects, especially concerning the prospect of importing Confucian considerations to contemporary "western" ethics.

I suppose I ought to give a quick translation of 15.29, with my reading of dao. 人能弘道，非道弘人。 ("The person has the ability to enrich right action; it is not right action that enriches the person.")
The natural actions of the one who has established the root (ben) is what gives meaning and all significance to right action. One cannot adopt right action as a way to enrich oneself--that is, one cannot take a list of ethical rules and hope to be enriched in any significant way by following them (this I take as a disagreement with many western ethicists). Rather, right action will be defined by the natural action that flows from one's character when one has established the root. This sounds very daoist, but we must remember that part of establishing the root is adhering to li ("ritual", for lack of a better word)--as Confucius says in 1.2 that filiality and brotherhood constitute (at least in part) the root, and acting in accord with li is part of this. Right action follows from the establishment of the root--so we are going about ethical cultivation in the wrong way when we worry about what actions are right actions--Confucius seems to claim that right actions just are the actions of those who have successfully established the root. But these actions will be different depending on different character types. This is why the person can be said to enrich right action. The dao flows from one's own character--it is the good character that determines right action, rather than the other way around. It is this that right action is dependent on the individual character, even though in each case right action will conduce to establishing the thriving society.

more to come...

Further Thoughts on Analects 1.1

2006-05-16T14:21:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking about Analects 1.1 a bit more this morning, especially the final sentence, 人不知而不慍，不亦君子乎？("Having others not know [you], but not being angered, is this not like the junzi?)

Although I am convinced by the Brooks' "accretion hypothesis", and more than likely Book 1 is not the earliest of the texts in the Analects, I think it is a nice touch that the Analects as we have it today begins with such a statement. The final sentence of 1.1 is a warning against a kind of moral motivation many of us (especially scholars, I would guess) have. To be known, to be applauded and praised--this is unimportant for Confucius. The truly "exemplary" person (Ames and Rosemont's translation of junzi is my favorite) is undeterred by the failure of others to recognize them. It is not recognition that is the goal of the junzi, rather, it is the bringing about of the thriving society, the good society.

This was especially important for Confucius to get across to an audience of scholars, who would likely (and still do today) feel slighted and disheartened by the fact that their hard work may go un-praised and ignored. It is a far more important lesson than may seem upon first reading 1.1, and one that has relevance today. I have seen the lust for position and praise as an enormous motivation of scholars today. I take it that one of the things we should learn from Confucius is that this is a dead end--that this motivation cannot help one to bring about the thriving society (and perhaps can't even bring the individual to realize their own goals). Recognition is fickle and fleeting. To depend on this, then, is uneven. It's not something that can keep us strong in our drive to bring about the thriving society. If one is motivated by recognition, when it is impossible, they no longer care. When it is attained, they no longer care. It is not conducive to the moral life. 1.1 here mirrors 4.14: 不患莫己知，求為可知也。 ("Don't be afraid to have no one know [you], rather seek to do [what would be worthy of] being known.")

This is a very appropriate way to begin the Analects, and a good lesson for all of us to learn. Maybe the Analects should be required reading for all scholars!

Analects 1.1

2006-05-14T17:19:00.000-04:00

Starting at the beginning...

(1.1) 子曰：「學而時習之，不亦說乎？有朋自遠方來，不亦樂乎？人不知而不慍，不亦君子乎？」

TRANSLATION:
The master said: "Studying and having time to practice what you study, is this not a happy thing? Having friends come from far away to see you, is this not joyful? Having others not know (you) but not being angered, is this not like the junzi 君子?

COMMENTARY:
I italicize the final sentence because this is the meat of the passage. Here is, if not a partial definition, an attribution of certain properties to the junzi. The term is commonly translated "gentleman"; I prefer Ames and Rosemont's "exemplary person", but I will leave it untranslated, as it is a technical term, one which is important to the Confucian project in
general. The junzi is an attainable state, an exemplar of moral action. In the Confucian literature, emphasis is placed (as it is in Chinese ethics in general) on character types, rather than "virtues". Virtues might be said to play a role, but the ultimate aspiration is to a character, rather than possession of a virtue. I believe, although this needs to be argued for, that there are not a set of necessary virtues that define the junzi (or any other of the exemplars of Confucianism, such as the sheng ren ["sage"]). Rather, there may be various sets of virtues possessed by different junzi, which have no single member in common. However, all junzi will of
neccessity possess multiple virtues. It the success of the virtues of the junzi in bringing about a kind of action that tends toward benefit of the state, the construction of "the thriving society" that determines one's status as a junzi. You can clearly see from this how my thoughts from the
last post have developed about legalism being a development from this early Confucianism.

Anyway--here in 1.1 we have a description of one property of a junzi. The claim seems to be that one who is not angered at being unknown is a junzi. That is, having such a character is a sufficient condition for "junzi-ship." But is it a necessary condition? This is a tricky question, and it depends on how we choose to read the final bit of the highlighted sentence of 1.1. The Chinese is 不亦君子乎 (literally, "not also junzi ?"). I've chosen in my translation to read it as marking the property of being unagitated by obscurity as a sufficient, but not necessary, condition for being a junzi. To read it as a necessary condition, one would be taking the bu yi junzi hu as marking a biconditional--one is only a junzi given such and such a condition. But given the parallel structure of the two sentences prior to the final sentence of 1.1, I think we should see the final sentence as having the same structure. The first two sentences are clearly giving sufficient but not necessary conditions. We can see that learning and practicing may
be a sufficient condition for happiness, but it seems odd that Confucius would have thought it a necessary condition. Likewise with having friends come from afar to visit. This could be a sufficient, but not a necessary condition for joyfulness. Surely one could be overjoyed at something other than friends coming from afar to visit. Given that the first two sentences
give us sufficient but non-necessary conditions, then, I believe the third also does.

The above considerations are more important for my program in general than they may first appear. It turns out that there will be very few necessary conditions for being a junzi (or another one of the Confucian exemplars), though there are many sufficient conditions. This does a number of things. First, it allows for people of very different character types to all aspire
to the height of morality. This is something I find unique about Chinese ethics, in opposition to much ethics in the western tradition, in which the exemplar will often be of a certain character type, which often seems to limit the "good life" to those who are naturally of such a character. Confucian ethics is more flexible than this, and this is a good example. I will point out this flexibility again in considerations of other passages. Second, it allows for variability in circumstance, and a way to tie morality to circumstance. More about this later.

Confucian Legalism

2006-05-12T18:46:00.000-04:00

Is Han Feizi's legalism really an "amoral" political system, designed with simply control and order of the state in mind? Or is a sophisticated form of a particular strand of Confucianism? More and more I am coming to think the latter. If one takes my earlier claims seriously, that the benefit of the state is the goal of the Confucian moral system, the "end in itself", then it looks like the details of Confucius's own program (as given in the Analects) are perhaps less important to Confucianism than the goal itself.

So there are a few questions we could ask of the Analects. Is ren necessary for the existence of the thriving society? Is li necessary? Or are these simply ways to bring about the thriving society from where Confucius himself sits? One might think that ren and li are sufficient to bring about the thriving society--Confucius may have thought they were sufficient to bring this about from his vantagepoint, but this does not mean that he held that ren and li were necessary conditions of a thriving society. Could he have thought that given a different vantagepoint, some other methods of achieving the thriving society might work better? That is, is Confucius really as rigid as daoists often made him out to be? Perhaps not. I suspect that Han Feizi's legalism is not ruled out by Confucius, and that if Confucius was truly after the thriving society, as I argue, then he may have taken legalism to be a way of bringing this about. But I'm not sure of this, and at this stage, it's mostly just speculation. I have yet to find evidence in the texts. But I'll be looking, and if I find anything interesting, I'll be sure to post it here.

The first question may be the simplest one: is there anything in either the Analects or in Han Feizi's legalism that rules the other out?

Also: as the semester is finally over, and I've got some time now to really dig into this stuff, I'm going to be posting some commentary on the Analects, as well as translation. I've been wanting to get started on this project for some time, but things always kept coming up. What will follow is my translation of a passage of the Analects and commentary of it for each passage (or the ones I'm most interested in, at least), as well as some comparison with western political philosophy (which I'm also reading this summer).

Hope to hear what you think!

Axial Age Madness??

2006-05-05T14:36:00.000-04:00

I've been looking through A.C. Graham's "Disputers of the Tao" and found what I take to be a statement of why many philosophers find the Pre-Qin period so interesting but are quickly bored by the Han. Graham says, right on page one of his Introduction:

"China, like the other civilizations of the Old World, draws its basic ideas from that time of awakening between 800 and 200 B.C. which Karl Jaspers has called the Axial Period, the age of the Greek and Indian philosophers, the Hebrew prophets and Zarathustra. The creative thinking of that era seems everywhere to have sprung up amid the variety and instability of small competing states; in China it begins toward 500 B.C. in a time of political disunion, and may be judged to lose its impetus with the reunification of the empire in 221 B.C."

There you have it--the "axial age" was more interesting than the surrounding times because of the philosophical and religious creativity sparked by political instability. There are a number of things that bother me about this apparently widely held belief.

First, I am suspicious of "axial age" claims in the first place. The religion of Zarathustra seems to be a somewhat arbitrary boundary line for the beginning of the age (around 1000 B.C), and even this religion was probably an amalgamation previous religious thought (as in many new religions). Also, the upper boundary of the age seems very arbitrary as well--there were certainly great innovations in both Greek, Middle eastern, Indian, (and yes, Chinese) philosophical and religious thought after 200 B.C. Messianic Judaism (including the Christian movement) comes to mind, as well as Hellenistic philosophy (Skeptics, Stoics, etc.), deep philosophical changes in Buddhism within the Mahayana tradition, the amalgamation of "modern" Hinduism...and these are just a few. It seems wrong to claim that innovations such as these were merely changes of pre-existent worldviews, whereas the innovations of the axial age were completely original. I simply see no evidence that the axial age innovations were any more original then the innovations in philosophy and religion that happened before and after the axial age. Of course, the axial age innovations certainly were striking new creations, but so were many other innovations throughout human history.

Another thing I take issue with is Graham's claim (of course not his alone) that the cause of such axial age innovation was political instability. In axial age China, this was certainly the case, however in other areas, this was not true. If we take it for granted that political instability motivates creativity, we should expect (as we don't find) that contemporary American society (for the last two hundred years or so) should be less creative than more war-ravaged societies. Even if this is true, it isn't obviously the case. Surely there are some relatively stable societies in which innovation thrives, as well as the opposite. So I think Graham's explanation here is lacking.

This kind of reasoning and viewing the axial age as a completely original period has led to some claims I find a bit dubious. I heard an interview with Karen Armstrong on NPR, on her new book "The Great Transformation" about axial age thought. I haven't yet read the book (I think I'll read it this summer), but she claimed on the show that there were certain common elements to axial age thinkers, such as an emphasis on compassion. In the case of axial age China, this is untrue. There were some thinkers who emphasized this (especially Mencius and Mozi), but there were others who either cared little for compassion in particular or openly rejected it (I'm thinking mainly of Zhuangzi in the first case, the legalists in the second). I see her search for a "common cause" as a symptom of the kind of sentiment revealed in the Graham quote above--the view that there was something unique in the axial age not to be found in other periods. I think this is untrue, and this is the reason such a "common cause" will not be found. (that said, I think Armstrong is an excellent writer, and highly recommend her work. I'm currently in the middle of "A History of God". I also plan to check out her writings on Islam.)

Anyway--perhaps it is for reasons like Graham's that many philosophers ignore Han dynasty philosophy. However, I think considerations such as those above justify a reappraisal of those reasons.

Zhi (智) in Confucian literature

2006-05-04T17:40:00.000-04:00

Here are a few notes (from a few years back) on zhi 智(commonly translated as "wisdom") in Confucian literature. I've argued that this should be translated as "of proper mind" rather than wisdom. Also, I've argued that this word is different from the other zhi (知) commonly used in the Analects (without the radical yue (曰) ["to speak"] attached). I haven't thought about this much for a while, but I've recently been worrying a bit about the moral epistemology of the Analects, so I thought I'd go ahead and post some of this stuff. Let me know what you think!

ZHI 智
The main argument I wish to make below for interpreting zhi as "of proper
mind" in Confucian literature is that some translations of the term seem to
neglect the link in Confucius between the epistemic and the moral. Western
philosophical tradition has commonly split the two into different realms.
For Confucius, however, no part of human life is free from the moral.
Everything is appraised in moral terms. Every facet of human life is engaged
with the moral enterprise Confucius sets out in the Analects. Too many translations
I've seen fail to translate zhi in a way which bridges the gap between the
epistemic and the moral.

The two parts of this character are zhi 知(to know, understand) and (Ames
and Hall say ri 日(sun), but I think there may be a case that it is yue
曰(to speak). One initial attempt to render the word, based on this, might
be "to speak knowledge" or "to speak knowingly." This lends to the tendency
to translate zhi as "wisdom." However, this term has implications in the
west which I think would make it seem more appropriate for other Chinese
terms. "Wisdom" seems to refer to a certain presence of mind, or a general
and practical knowledge of some type, which can be applied to real situations.

We think of someone who is wise as someone having a certain type of knowledge,
namely valuable knowledge. The term zhi does not, I think, refer to a
type of knowledge, in theway "wisdom" seems to, but rather to a certain
characteristic inherent in some of those who have knowledge, an ability
to "hit the mark", or to speak in an appropriate and knowledgeable manner.

These meanings are also included in the term "wisdom." The main difficulty
I find with "wisdom" is that it both has meanings definitely not a part of
zhi, and it is also not as wide a term as zhi, as is often the case when
we compare lean English vocabulary to much more elastic Chinese counterpart
terms.

Translations of zhi (in the Analects)
In their translation of the Analects, Ames and Hall translate zhi, in which
they consider 知and 智as one term, as "to realize." (though they use "understanding"
and "wisdom" at various places in the text as well). This seems an appropriate
translation, especially for 知, rather than "to know." However, I'm a little
worried about clumping the other character 智in with this, as it seems to
me to refer to a different aspect of the general term zhi. If we do what
Ames and Hall have done, zhi seems to become a general epistemic term. In
some texts this might be too broad. If both these epistemic terms are to
be bundled together to express one main idea, "realization" is probably
better than "knowledge," for the reasons Ames and Hall mention, that "to
realize" recognizes the active sense of the term zhi, while "to know" denotes
a passive, post-reflective state we're in once we've already made our epistemic
decisions. In this way, "to know" seems to describe a state, whereas "to
realize" describes a process. This is keeping with the general tendency
in Ames and Hall to read the Chinese vocabulary as processual rather than
concrete or "substantive." I agree with this move.
Chan, in his Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy, translates zhi as "knowledge"
and "wisdom" in the Analects.

Translation based on zhi, yue
"To speak knowingly" seems to indicate some kind of characteristic, rather
than stored information. I avoid the Ames and Hall "to realize" for the
知 part of this character, because "realize" might seem strange taken adverbally
(realizingly??) zhi might be read as "having the character to speak in
the right way", posessing a sort of inner cultivation which allows one to
constantly "hit the mark." Following Jullien's concern with propensity,
we might even think of zhi as a kind of propensity to act in a certain type
of way, to properly speak, to be on the mark.

Consider a passage from Analects
4.2: "知(I'm reading this as 智here. Ames and Hall seem to do this also,
translating it as "wisdom") 者利仁。 If we take zhi zhe as "those of proper
mind," taking zhi to be "of proper mind", this passage reads "those of proper
mind thrive in ren." This sounds right to me-- "of proper mind," I think,
gets rid of some of the baggage of "wisdom" as applying a certain type of
knowledge, or simply having great knowledge. "of proper mind" seems to link
the epistemic with the ethical in a way I think Confucius's thought demands.

We might, however, be somewhat careful to claim that there's an ethical
sense to epistemic terms in Confucius, because part of the task of the Analects
is to show that all aspects of human life are part of the ethical. If we
build in such an ethical sense to epistemic terms, then why would Confucius
need to demonstrate that the epistemic terms do come under the scope of
the ethical? Why wouldn't it be something everyone already knew, just by
the meaning of words?

The reason I advocate reading zhi as having an ethical sense is that I believe
Confucius's teachings give the terms such meaning, regardless of what was
contained in them before. Many terms used in the Analects are terms which
Confucius reworked into his system of ethics based on ren. Terms such as
junzi, and even ren itself took on new meanings in Confucius, determined
by their place in his ethical system. I believe we should read zhi in this
way, as occupying a position with respect to ren. In this light, it would
not make sense to consider zhi in isolation from Confucius's ethical system.
This shows the possible inadequacy of a translation of zhi as "wisdom".

Finally, I will consider some relevant passages in Confucius, with the "wisdom"
zhi changed to "of proper mind". Rather than retranslating the
passages, I'll work from the Ames and Hall version of the Analects.

2.17-- "The Master said: "Zilu, shall I teach you what it is to be of proper
mind? To know what you know, and know what you do not know--this then is
being of proper mind."

4.1-- "The Master said: "In taking up one's residence, it is the presence
of ren that is the greatest attraction. How can anyone be called of proper
mind who, in having the choice, does not seek to dwell among authoritative
people?"

6.22-- "Fan Chi inquired about being of proper mind. The Master replied,
'to devote yourself to what is appropriate (yi 義) for the people, and to
show respect for the ghosts and spirits while keeping them at a distance
can be called being of proper mind."

Especially in the final passage, I think the superiority of "of proper
mind" over "wisdom" becomes apparent.

Ren, Social Properties, and Western Comparisons

2006-04-26T12:23:00.000-04:00

The word 'ren' (translated variously as "benevolence", "human-heartedness", "humanity") had, for Confucius, an ineliminably social meaning. It is one of the important ethical concepts in Confucian writings, and is something that cannot, I believe, be attained to by one's self. In one of my entries below, I discussed Analects 15.33, where Confucius speaks of the person who is able to "guard ren" (shou ren). There are many other places in the Analects where Confucius talks about those "with ren" (ren ren or ren zhe), but it is unclear to me that this entails that one has a property in the same way we today talk of one having courage, or having integrity--qualities that can be the domain of a particular individual, without consideration of what is going on in society around one.

Of course, for Aristotle, it appears that sometimes the individual's possession of a virtue had to do with external chance--one can only be generous if one is successful at giving, rather than simply having the intention to give, for example. But even Aristotle's virtues must be considered things had by an individual.

I believe that the notion of ren for Confucius is very different than this. We get into problems, I think, reading Confucius as an Aristotle-type "virtue-ethicist" for this reason (among others I won't get into here). Ren cannot be thought of as a virtue in the Aristotelian sense mainly because ren cannot be possessed by one in the way a virtue can.

Confucius talks of one's thoughts being on ren, or guarding ren. Why should we take this as meaning that one guards ren in oneself? Given the social meaning of ren, it seems more plausible to me to hold that Confucius thought that ren could be guarded simply because ren is a property of a social group, perhaps like peace or harmony (which, I know, could also be applied to individuals, but would of necessity reference different parts of individuals, --i.e. the legs are in harmony with the arms, etc.).

Ren as a property of groups can be initiated by an individuals, just as can peace within a group. So the notion of ren as a social property does not make it impossible to make sense of talk of individual involvement with ren. Most ethical properties, in fact, seem to have an individual as well as social component. However, we tend to put the emphasis on one or the other in coming to give an account of the concept--so that honesty, for example, is focused on the individual, even though there is certainly a social aspect of honesty.

I think my opposition to letting ren be cast as a virtue in the Aristotelian sense has much to do with the neglect of the ineliminably social aspects of ren that follows (which is surely the key to the concept), as well as with strong reservations about understanding ancient Chinese thinkers through the goggles of western philosophy.

getting things straight in PRC v. Falun Dafa debate

2006-04-20T12:21:00.000-04:00

I have lately come across something rather unsettling. I have heard from people and seen in some major US news sources, that the situation between the Chinese government and the Falun Dafa/Falun Gong religious movement is that between a "totalitarian government" and a "peaceful group." There are two unsettling things about this whole debate.

Although the PRC may be unfair in their outright ban of the group (though I don't want to commit to this because I don't know the circumstances), I think many people in the US have been hoodwinked by the Falun Gong's claim to be a "peaceful philosophy", something which is neither a religion nor objectionable. I heard a friend (unaffiliated with the group) in a conversation the other day claim that the group only promotes exercises and health philosophy, and is against human rights violations of the PRC.

This is, in fact, misinformation. First, if Falun Dafa is not a religion, then neither is anything else. It comes replete with gods, talk of Buddhas, and everything else one would associate with a religion.

Second, although perhaps the sect should be allowed to exist and practice, their doctrine is far from unobjectionable. Li Hongzhi, the founder and leader of the Falun Dafa group, has promoted views such as that homosexuality is disgusting, and (what I find most revolting) that those of mixed-race are somehow corrupted and perhaps evil, and that there are various "heavens" for different races. This kind of doctrine, I think, is certainly not only wrong, but offensive. However, these doctrines are often ignored by those unfamiliar with Falun Dafa and instead the group's opposition to the ban by the PRC is emphasized.

Regardless of which side is right in the battle between the PRC and the Falun Dafa movement, we should at least get straight exactly what both sides promote, and what they don't. And being a proponent of human rights myself, I don't think that a group whose spiritual leader promotes racism and homophobia has very much moral force in a debate on human rights.

Translation or Interpretation?

2006-04-18T12:05:00.000-04:00

Wandering around through a bookstore this weekend, I noticed a couple more of the ever multiplying translations of the Daodejing. I took a glance at both of these translations (I don't remember the names of the translators, but I do recall that one of them is a scholar in Buddhist studies). The way I generally appraise translations of the DDJ is to look right at the first chapter, the "dao ke dao fei chang dao" bit to see how the translator handles this. All too often, I see very strange or "non-literal", overinterpretive translations.

I think translators (especially of the DDJ) have flown too far into the realm of interpretation in their translations. "Literal" translations are fairly hard to come by (moreso for the DDJ and daoist literature than for other sources). Although I realize that it is a near impossibility to really render a classical chinese text in literal translation, I do believe that this ought to be our aim to come as close as we can. Following this methodology, we should translate such that if the original text is ambiguous, our translation should aspire to be equally ambiguous (ambiguous in the same way).

Why is this? Well, when we present hard works like the DDJ to a general audience (or any audience without the ability to read in classical chinese), we ought to allow the audience interpretive license of their own. When we translate texts to precisely follow our particular interpretations, we are begging the question against those who support other interpretations of the text. Thus, when one without the advantage of having classical chinese comes to our loaded intepretations, this person cannot even understand the debate between different camps on interpretations of the text. "How can intepretation x be correct?" the reader will think, "the text explicitly endorses view y!"

For example, in one of the translations of the DDJ I mentioned at the beginning of this post, Chapter 1 is translated to be about metaphysics (dao) and language/concepts (ming). This is certainly contentious--personally I think it's also incorrect--but at least there is disagreement about this. Given that reasonable scholars disagree on these points, it can't be the case that the DDJ makes an explicit statement of the "metaphysical dao" view. Of course, those of us familiar with the DDJ know, the text is very unclear on this point (and many others). Thus it seems to me that more "literal-minded" translations serve better as translations geared toward a general audience unfamiliar with the literature or one without classical chinese ability. We ought to save our intepretations (as much as possible) for our books and articles.

Again, I realize that a certain amount of interpretation is inevitable in translation of these texts. But there is certainly more interpretive license being taken when one renders ming ke ming fei chang ming as: "Conceptual constructions that can be grasped as such are not accurate conceptual constructions" (for example), rather than the closer to literal translation: "a name that can name is not a constant name".

Han Dynasty Needs Philosophers!

2006-04-13T12:30:00.000-04:00

I'm currently reading Ban Gu's "Qian Han Shu" (History of the Former Han), and just finished writing an article I sent off to JCP on Wang Chong, a Han dynasty philosopher. So I've been thinking a bit about the Han lately. One thing I find fairly suprising is that there does not seem to be much interest in Han within Chinese philosophy here in the US. What work is done in Han philosophy is mainly within History or East Asian departments (for example Michael Nylan at Berkeley, Anne Behnke Kinney at UVA). I can't think of any philosophy department with Chinese philosophy scholars interested in Han.

Why is this? I've found the Han dynasty philosophy very engaging--although certainly Feng Youlan (and others) were right when they said that by the Han, the main strains of the Chinese philosophical tradition were already in place, the Han was a period of incredible development, and exciting philosophy. You have the Huainanzi, Dong Zhongshu, Yang Xiong, Wang Chong, Wang Fu--many great philosophers and texts, all of whom played key roles in the development of Chinese philosophy. I think there are issues of philosophical method in the Han philosophers that are often ignored, and need to be explored further. But if none of us work on Han, we'll never be able to fish this stuff out. Historians are working on Han, but they're not philosophers, and sometimes, I find, they miss certain philosophical points we philosophers would not likely miss.

I guess this is simply my entreaty for more focus by philosophers on Han dynasty philosophy.

Ren and Li according to Analects 15.33

2006-04-12T17:56:00.000-04:00

Here is a passage from the Analects that seems to me to defy many of the interpretations of the relationship between ren (humanity...?) and li (ritual). 15.33 reads:

The master said: 'If one who reaches knowledge is unable to guard ren; even if this person attains it, they necessarily lose it. If one who reaches knowledge is able to guard ren, but does not skillfully manage the people, then the people will not be reverent. If one who reaches knowledge is able to guard ren, skillfully manages the people, but in motivating them does not use li, this person has not yet done the right thing. ' (translation is my own)

This seems to go against the interpretation of the ren/li relationship which holds that making one's actions accord with li is the very definition of what it is to be ren. After all, the end of this passage considers a person who is able to "guard ren" but not "use li". Surely if to be ren is to act in accordance with li then the above would not be possible (unless "guard" [shou] does not entail "has"--which would be odd, I think).

At the same time, this passage looks like it is opposed to the interpretation of the ren/li relationship which holds that li is a way to enhance ren, the natural "human-heartedness" that a person might cultivate. In 15.33, we have ren discussed the same way in all three sections--it seems not to change. However, the person who has ren can change, and be a better or worse person, depending on what other "virtues" the person has. It looks like this passage might help to support a view of ren as a "non-major" contributing virtue for Confucius. Might it not be that ren is not a supreme virtue, but simply a necessary condition for being a junzi, although one Confucius concentrates on more than, say, yi ("righteousness"...?) or zhi ("knowledge"), because, perhaps, he finds ren more lacking in his students and the society at large than most of the other virtues?

For example, if I were teaching a bunch of lazy students, I might emphasize hard work more than other virtues, in my descriptions of the ideal person. This would not be because being hard-working is more important a virtue than, say, honesty, but rather because all of my students are honest, but most of them are lazy, so I decide they need no help with honesty, and great help with their laziness. I think something like this may be what is going on with ren, which may be part of the reason it is notoriously hard to crack.

Any thoughts?

place for chinese philosophy, etc.

2006-04-12T12:13:00.000-04:00

Hello--here is a site that I hope will grow into something much bigger. I will post here on Chinese philosophy in general; topics I'm currently working on, as well as other interesting things going on in the field (and ok, ok--maybe some stuff on philosophy in general too, but not as much). Not sure what the etc. above is supposed to mean, other than that I won't be held back from mentioning other interesting stuff as it comes my way--but I'll try to stick mainly to the larger subject matter.
Enjoy--and let's converse!