Warp, Weft, and Way

A Group Blog of Chinese and Comparative Philosophy

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  1. Does anyone know where to find an online version of Huang Kan’s 論語義疏?

    Comment by Ronggui | November 17, 2009 | Reply

  2. Hi,
    I’ve got a question about Roger Ames’ stance on early Chinese philosophy. I picked up a used book the other day, Self and Deception: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Enquiry, and the first sentence of Roger Ames’ contribution is:

    “One and many, free will and determinism, reality and appearance, mind and body, knowledge and opinion, good and evil – fundamental metaphysical problems, themselves all variations on the one-many problematic – were not interesting or important in shaping the classical Chinese philosophic tradition.”

    Now, I have a number of his books and have read numerous articles of his where he says something similar. He seems to state his view as fact, but I’m wondering if there’s a book or article he has written where he attempts to prove this. Thinking Through Confucius, maybe? (I’ve only read some parts of that – I don’t own it.) Or another book perhaps?

    Thanks,
    Scott

    Comment by Bao Pu | December 23, 2009 | Reply

  3. Hey Scott–
    Ames and Hall do a bunch of that in their books “Anticipating China” and “Thinking From the Han” as well. I’m not totally convinced by the arguments given there (although I am by some), but there are quite a few of them.

    Comment by alexusmcleod | December 23, 2009 | Reply

  4. You spoke about this topic previously – I wonder if it is still a topic people are involved with, or where you might refer me to learn more.
    It seems to me, in Confucius’ teaching, I when he spoke about a son and a father, he spoke in terms of positive concepts. For example in Legge, 13:18 in response to a Duke’s pointed interrogatory about a son who was aware his father had stolen a sheep, to me the only reasonable interpretation of C’s response is that a son who knows what it is to be a son would ‘protect, shield, conceal (in the sense of “hide it from”)’ the father by not allowing him to arrive at such a desperate condition such that he would have to resort to dishonoring himself and his family by stealing a sheep. As well, a father who knows what it is to be a father would be sure to have brought up his son in a manner which would inculcate mutuality, propriety, and selfless conscientiousness, thereby ‘innoculating’ the son so that he too would be protected from the shame which incurs from bad behavior. To Confucius, positive actions spoke much louder than words so the father would ‘protect, shield, conceal’ his son by giving him an example of the virtues above.
    Regarding the Duke’s question, Confucius appears to not allow it, if it only applies to the son. In his teaching, or in his ‘country’ the education to the intertwined mutuality does not leave room, ideally, for the occasion to arise.
    I think the use of the word ‘conceal’ by C. was a word game playing on the Duke’s implication that for the son not to report the father would be unacceptable.

    Comment by Dan Huck | January 2, 2010 | Reply

    • Hello Dan; interesting comments, though I find them slightly problematic. I’m not so sure how “concealing” is a positive, as opposed to negative, concept. The distinction in types of concept is itself opaque to me. In any case, I’m not sure how not allowing someone to arrive at their present condition could plausibly be glossed as “concealing” for them.

      Whenever I think about Analects 13:18, I wonder why Confucius wouldn’t simply have said something like, “Where I come from, the upright are different from this; fathers don’t steal things and hence sons don’t have to conceal their fathers’ actions.” Instead, Confucius seems to be a proponent of a kind of extreme domestic loyalty. And he’s not alone in this; the account that Mencius gives of the sage king Shun in Mencius 5A resonates with Analects 13:18.

      Comment by Manyul Im | January 3, 2010 | Reply

    • Dan, by “positive concept” do you mean a concept that isn’t a value-term like “should,” but rather something more like a factual term, e.g. “what it is to be a son”?

      Manyul, I think the extreme idea in that passage is the Duke’s view, not Confucius’ view. By and large, I think, sons would cover up for such a theft; and I would expect that most people think that’s what a good son would do. My guess is that most Americans in 2010 would say that’s what one should do, or at least that it’s the least bad choice. And I’m inclined to agree. Do we know anything about what the punishment for stealing a sheep might have been in Confucius’ day?

      I think that if Confucius had had a radical view about the importance of filial piety, we would have some record of a significant defense of that view by him, which I think we don’t. There isn’t anything by him in the Analects even endorsing, much less defending, the “Confucian” idea that filial piety is the core of the moral life. I think that idea came into his tradition shortly after he died.

      Surely most sons would have covered up for their fathers back then, or the Duke’s boast would have made little sense as a boast. Hence Confucius’ statement, understood in the usual way, would have been true; while if he had said what you propose, he would have been saying something false.

      Comment by Bill H | January 4, 2010 | Reply

      • I vaguely recall that we had this discussion on the old blog. You don’t really mean that sheep theft in Confucius’ day would have been a) common or b) looked upon lightly by Confucius, do you? Maybe (a) could be true, but if (b) is not, then there is something morally exotic about the default attitude that you suggest, I think. And I’m not sure most Americans would say it is the least bad choice to cover up for one’s father, supposing that the crime is serious enough. The emphasis on concealing, or covering up, seems oddly “un-Confucian,” as opposed to correcting or going around to make things right discreetly.

        Comment by Manyul Im | January 4, 2010 | Reply

      • Manyul, I was unfair to your proposal for what Confucius should have said. By “Fathers don’t steal…” you meant, “Upright fathers don’t steal…”.

        I hope I didn’t suggest that (a) stealing sheep was common practice then, nor stealing cars now! Also I didn’t mean to suggest that (b) for Confucius, theft is not serious (but in 10.17 he didn’t ask about the horses).

        (I might have seemed to suggest (b) by saying that Confucius did not think filial piety important, for I would then be saying that he thought something unimportant would justify not punishing a thief. But I only said he didn’t think filial piety is fundamental to all the rest of morality. He clearly thinks filiality important and worth doing right, though he almost never mentions it in connection with 仁 or the 君子.)

        Regarding public opinion, I too do not claim certainty. (Maybe Eric Schwitzgebel can take a poll!) And I was talking only about the case of “such a theft,” not the most serious crimes. I think most people would probably agree that the Unabomber’s brother should indeed have turned him in. I agree too, though I remember taking just a moment to think about it at the time.

        One might think stealing is seriously wrong but also think that the proper response to another’s wrong, especially a parent’s wrong, isn’t to turn her in to the Government. (Confucius wants to try to treat existing governments as legitimate, but he seems to oppose the whole idea of a penal code, thinking that what one should do instead is to set an example of virtue, filial piety. (Cf. also 14.21: “… ‘It is because I have an official rank that I have felt obliged to make this report.’…” (Leys).) )

        I wouldn’t be surprised if Confucius was less impressed by the wrongness of stealing than we tend to be. When we Western Philosophers think of morality, we often think first of ruling out things like lying, stealing, killing; and perhaps we strain to find reasons to think these things are virtually always wrong. (One of the other commandments, “Honor they father and thy mother,” has an influence on popular opinion in our God-fearing land that can escape the notice of secular philosophers.) Confucius, by contrast, doesn’t much talk about such wrongs. Even his virtue of good faith 信 is perhaps not paradigmatically the avoidance of lying.

        As for whether covering-up is un-Confucian:

        Granted, good faith is a central Confucian virtue. But trustworthiness arguably cuts both ways in the sheep case. I don’t think Confucius thinks the fully virtuous person would be covering things up. Life puts some sons in non-仁 environments in which no course is going to be fully in accord with all the virtues. For example, it is to Ning Wu’s credit that he is stupid in a country without the Way (5.21).

        Confucius does seem to think that filial piety can justify what would otherwise be wrong or at least not ideal. He says a son who sticks to his father’s way for three years is a good son (1.11, 4.20; cf.11.22). No doubt we are to understand some limits here, but Confucius doesn’t say the way has to be Confucius’ own. And he says that when one thinks one’s parents are going wrong, one say something about it but obey (4.18).

        Confucius seems to think facts about the past should sometimes be suppressed (3.21). He is famously not a chatterbox (5.13, 9.1; 6.21, 7.15, 8.5, 8.14, 9.30).

        Comment by Bill H | January 4, 2010 | Reply

    • Dan, I’m not sure whether you’re asking where to look for discussion of “positive concepts” in Confucius, or where to look for discussion of Confucius on filial piety, or 13.18 in particular. But if it’s filial piety or 13.18, one place to look is the Spring and Summer 2008 issues of Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy.”

      Comment by Bill H | January 4, 2010 | Reply

  5. Is anyone aware of an English translation of the Zhouli 周禮?

    Comment by Ronggui | January 28, 2010 | Reply

  6. I just discovered this old interview with Joel Kupperman where he mentions some benefits of studying Chinese philosophy.
    http://advance.uconn.edu/2002/021021/02102111.htm

    I was wondering what others might have to say about this.

    Note: Kupperman’s book is titled Six Myths about the Good Life (Hackett 2006), which Philip Ivanhoe calls “a modern classic.”

    Comment by Scott 'Bao Pu' Barnwell | February 7, 2010 | Reply

    • Hi Scott,

      I can’t claim knowledge here, but I can’t imagine how someone could think that that Asian thought has significantly more to say about everyday life and the little things than does Western thought. I wonder whether Kupperman’s view amounts to a kind of semantic point, or semantic mistake, about the word “philosophy.” Consider, for example, Benjamin Franklin’s practical checklist for each day (compare Zengzi at Analects 1.4):

      ———
      1. TEMPERANCE.Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.

      2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.

      3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

      4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.

      5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.

      6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.

      7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.

      8. JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.

      9. MODERATION. Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.

      10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.

      11.TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.

      12. CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.

      13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
      ———

      We don’t therefore call Franklin a moral philosopher. And I wonder whether we call it “philosophy” when Aristotle says that the great-souled person walks slowly. What we call “philosophy” in the West is concerned more with rational justification of such views, and hence tends toward abstract argument (sometimes considering big choices as a kind of test case and for other reasons). There is a vast body of thought and literature on such daily matters in the West, dwarfing in volume the whole body of what we call “philosophy” in the West. I suspect that one reason such things are a bigger proportion of what we call Chinese “philosophy” is that we want to have a big body of writings to call “philosophy” in China. That clearly isn’t the only reason though.

      Comment by Bill Haines | February 7, 2010 | Reply

    • Here’s a whole nother issue: what is Kupperman’s “big-moment ethics”?

      Picture A:
      In the 2002 piece Scott found for us, the writer tells us Kupperman “says much of Western philosophy centers on dramatic one-time choices, the big moments in life when a person has a real temptation, or could kill, steal, or do something else that would have major consequences. ‘Then you look for some kind of principle that would help you through the situation,’ Kupperman says. ‘It gives the picture that all there is to knowing how to live is handling these big moments.’ But these moments, for most people, don’t come up very often.”

      Picture B
      In the string “Confucius: The Action Movie”, I wrote, “When Kupperman speaks of ‘big moment ethics,’ his idea seems to be that according to ‘traditional moral codes,’ morality is limited to certain discrete and largely negative requirements such that doing our best to be fully moral requires only very occasional ‘moments’ of attention to the moral requirements.”

      Here’s what B is based on. A few weeks ago when I went to look up what Kupperman means by “big moment ethics,” I decided that the key text was his “Confucius and the Nature of Religious Ethics,” PEW 21:2 (1971), 189-94. There he wrote,

      “most of a man’s life normally is entirely neutral with respect to traditional moral codes; that is, moments of moral choice or action normally will comprise very little of the duration of his life.” (192)
      “Most of us are familiar with what might be called ‘big-moment’ ethics. In this form of ethics, the focus is entirely on moments of sharp moral decision: when a man decides whether or not to rob the bank, commit murder, commit adultery, admit his responsibility in previous actions, etc. A ‘big-moment’ ethics almost inevitably will place the highest virtue in dependably making the right moral decision, and almost inevitably will treat life apart from moments of moral choice as what I have called a ‘free-play’ zone. This zone usually will be very large, since most people are not incessantly in the process of making moral decisions. Thus ‘big-moment’ ethics is both comfortable and dramatic. It is comfortable because it enables us not to worry too much about most of our life, and, indeed, usually does not demand too much thoughtfulness. It is dramatic because it typically highlights convulsive, visible, and brief efforts of the will.”(194)

      This 1971 material too suggests account A, but not as clearly as does the 2002 piece Scott found for us. Based on this 1971 material, I had settled on account B, out of charity, because after much effort I could not make any sense of A except as a reflection of B.

      The Ten Commandments are a small part of a traditional moral code. Consider a poor reader’s misconception of the Ten Commandments, as consisting entirely of some simple and easy Don’ts. Don’t kill, don’t steal, etc. I would guess that this wildly fictional case of a “traditional moral code” is the paradigmatic case (or one of two) of “big moment ethics.” But these simple commandments require that we refrain always, not just occasionally; and we almost always have the opportunity to kill, steal, etc. Still, for most of us there are only occasional moments when our temptations call us to attend to these rules in deciding what to do. Why is that? It is precisely because the rules are not very demanding. That’s picture B.

      (If we look not just at “traditional moral codes” but at actual Western moral thought, a central case is utilitarianism, which is not bigmomenty in any sense that I can think of. As Western introductory ethics classes and Peter Singer famously stress, it is not true that the moments when one could do something “that would have major consequences” are “one-time … big moments in life.”)

      If there’s another paradigmatic case of “big moment ethics,” I would guess that it’s the kind of paper that talks about dilemmas, especially medical dilemmas. The core of this sort of literature, I think, is matters of government action; not individual action. But we also use related dilemmas for individuals in trying to teach students to think and to test theories. In writing about Jim and the Indians, Bernard Williams is neither expressing nor attributing to utilitarianism the view that ethics is mainly about such dramatic choices.

      Comment by Bill Haines | February 7, 2010 | Reply

  7. Hi Bill,

    re: “I suspect that one reason such things are a bigger proportion of what we call Chinese “philosophy” is that we want to have a big body of writings to call “philosophy” in China.”

    – That’s a plausible view I think.

    re: “But these simple commandments require that we refrain always, not just occasionally; and we almost always have the opportunity to kill, steal, etc. Still, for most of us there are only occasional moments when our temptations call us to attend to these rules in deciding what to do.”

    – I’d say rare moments, not occasional. For most of us, we won’t ever find ourselves in situations which ask us whether to kill someone or not, whether to sacrifice one life for many, etc.

    Comment by Scott 'Bao Pu' Barnwell | February 7, 2010 | Reply

  8. Regarding the latter point, I suppose it depends on what rules we include in “Don’t kill, don’t steal, etc.” There’s also working on Saturday, taking the Lord’s name in vain, disobeying one’s parents, etc.

    Comment by Bill Haines | February 7, 2010 | Reply

  9. While checking on the status of the soon to be released translation of the Huainanzi (http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14204-5/the-huainanzi). I notced there is a new translation of the Mozi by Ian Johnston (http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-15240-2/the-mozi). Has anyone had a chance to See the Mozi book? I have never heard of Ian Johnson before, but it sounds promising. I also discovered a new translation of Mengzi by Irene Bloom (http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-12204-7/mencius). Anyone seen this?

    Comment by Scott "Bao Pu" Barnwell | March 10, 2010 | Reply

    • Hi Scott; I’ve read a couple of translations with commentary, of Gongsun Longzi and the later Mohists by Johnston, which were published in journals. They didn’t strike me as illuminating or especially attendant to possible issues of metaphysics (a la Hansen) or corresponding language and logic ones. Still, maybe it’s good — on general principle? — to have a translation out there of the Mozi corpus that includes the later Mohist material.

      I’ve seen the Bloom translation of Menicus. No strong opinion one way or the other. Anyone out there have one — i.e. a strong opinion?

      Comment by Manyul Im | March 11, 2010 | Reply

  10. Chad Hansen, in his A Daoist theory of Chinese Thought has written that “Morality’s purpose is to provide a more reliable and constant guide to behavior than our normal clan instincts.” He also wrote:

    “Confucian tradition came to accept Mozi’s contrast of universal versus partial as their key disagreement. Defending their stress on filial relationships, Confucians began directly to advocate a differential moral treatment based on social distance. It is not clear that Confucius himself thought so highly of partiality, as signaled by his various versions of the golden rule. Graham speculates that Mozi’s universalism derives from Confucius’ teaching of the golden rule. But the fact that Confucianism came to criticize Mozi on this ground underlines Rosemont’s worry that their school might never have learned any clear conception of morality. Their view of practical principles led them to blur morality, social mores, politeness, style, etiquette, and simple obedience.” (p. 100)

    Anyone have any thoughts on this they care to share?
    Thanks.

    Comment by Scott Barnwell | June 2, 2010 | Reply

    • I’m sympathetic with what Hansen says here. And yet …

      “led them to blur morality, social mores [etc.]” Social mores etc. are, to a first approximation, important components of morality, I think. I’m not sure what “blur” means here. It’s not a mistake not to draw a distinction between F and G, or not to emphasize the distinction; as it is a mistake to think that A is an F (as distinct from e.g. a G) on the grounds that A is a G. I think it’s quite hard to have a non-mistaken conception or even concept of morality, and that one should hesitate to suppose one has managed it.

      “any clear conception of morality” – a conception can be clear in the abstract without amounting to clear workaday guidance, and vice versa. At least if we identify Mohism with classical utilitarianism we can think Mohism achieved the former. Does anyone think it gave clear workaday guidance to a degree comparable to any sort of Confucianism? In practice utilitarianism is arguably not just imperfectly clear, but rather powerfully disorienting.

      “a differential moral treatment based on social distance” – on the level of workaday rules it’s fairly uncontroversial that such differential treatment is appropriate. I’m not sure to what extent Confucians after Confucius addressed a more abstract level on which impartiality would be more appropriate. I’m not sure anybody has ever done so with great plausiblity.

      “Morality’s purpose is to provide a more reliable and constant guide to behavior than our normal clan instincts.” – If ‘reliable’ here means “reliably correct,” i.e. reliably morally correct, then the term here is circular or empty. The other salient reading is that ‘reliable’ means “constant,” in which case the term does no distinctive work here. So Hansen’s claim seems to be that morality’s purpose is to be a more constant guide than clan instincts. That might be constancy over time or over different kinds of situation? But views about morality may be more variable in content than clan instincts are. And morality (a well developed moral sensibility? a fundamental principle? a list of workaday rules?) might be more sensitive to differences in situations than clan instincts are, in which case it might offer less “constant” guidance. Maybe by “clan instincts” here Hansen means clan instincts as expressed in whatever culture there is, though his overall argument stresses the distinction between that and clan instincts. — – What “constancy” could seem to be the purpose of morality? — – Maybe by “reliable” Hansen means “reliably beneficial,” so that his argument here presupposes the truth of Mohism?

      If morality is fundamentally at least partly about, say, impartial respect, then it might involve differential beneficence without any level of impartial beneficence, while being fundamentally impartial.

      Comment by Bill Haines | June 3, 2010 | Reply

      • Hi Bill,
        For the most part I understand what you’re getting at, but it is difficult to follow. It seems that Hansen sees morality as distinct from our normal clan instincts, but I think it’s clear that this ‘universal’ morality has as its foundation these clan instincts. (See Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved by Frans de Waal, 2006.) I see what you say about the use of ‘reliable’ in the Hansen quote. Hansen writes, “It is not clear that Confucius himself thought so highly of partiality, as signaled by his various versions of the golden rule.” Well Confucius also esteemed filial piety, which surely is more partial than universal, but I don’t know how highly his followers thought of partiality. Seems silly to me. Surely they felt that treating all people in a ren-like way was better than only treating one’s family this way. Makes me think of de Waal again: “Morality evolved to deal with our own community first, and has only recently begun to include members of other groups, humanity in general, and nonhuman animals. While applauding the expansion of the circle, this expansion is constrained by affordability, that is, circles are allowed to expand in times of abundance but will inevitably shrink when resources dwindle” (163-4). Peter Singer, in his section of de Waal’s book, mentions that it might not be so recent that the circle expanded (he mentions Mozi). Come to think of it, Mozi argued for frugality, which would allow for greater resources and thus a realistically expanded circle.

        Comment by Scott "Baopu" Barnwell | June 5, 2010 | Reply

    • I like what Bill has said in response. I’d like to go a bit further in problematizing the idea of “morality” that Chad uses here. There is an idea of morality that begins to come into its own — notwithstanding earlier antecedents — in early-modern Europe, and is focused on impartial duties to stangers. It’s plausible to think that social changes had a role in nudging this idea into the foreground, although China makes it clear that large, complex social organizations characterized by extensive commercial interaction do not on their own NECESSITATE the “morality” that we come to see in Europe. In any event, it is important to “morality” that it be distinct from things like “social mores, politeness, style, and etiquette”; I set aside “simple obedience” as a distinct phenomenon. But this does not mean that any reasonable way of providing a more reliable and constant guide — not just to beahvior, I would add, but to how to live and to be a worthwhile person — than whatever is provided by our UNTUTORED clan instincts must look like “morality.” The various early Confucian texts offer us other alternatives. For Rosemont, of course, the claim that Confucianism is not “morality” is meant to be an endorsement!

      One consequence of this way of looking at things is to suggest two quite different perspectives on the relationship between Mohism and utilitarianism. Perhaps those arguing for a strong similarity between the two are correct. If what I have been saying is right, then this means that the Mohists articulated an idea akin to “morality” and in so doing, essentially changed the subject on the Confucians. An alternative possibility (which I think much of the recent work on the Mohists by Chad’s students, among others, tends to suggest) is that the Mohists have much more in common with the Confucians that we have tended to think; among other things, they do not rely on anything like a modern European conception of “morality.” I wonder what those of you who’ve been working on the Mozi think about that?

      Comment by Steve Angle | June 5, 2010 | Reply

  11. Scott and Steve –

    Thank you for your most illuminating comments. I’m sorry to have been so obscure.

    I think part of the very idea of “morality” is that morality is supposed to be far from an arbitrary cultural product. It’s supposed to be in some sense the decisive truth on how to act; it’s supposed to be the way of living that’s right (or correct or good) simpliciter, something like that, tending to draw our attention and knowledge by itself (as the laws of physics do), so that an imperative out of context tends to count as a claim about what’s moral. Something like that. If there’s no such thing, then there’s no “morality.” (As Hans-Georg would remind us, there might still be such a thing as moral opinion, and therefore even moral rules in the sense of putatively moral rules, and the general practices of trying to be moral and trying to make one’s neighbors moral.)

    I think there probably is such a thing as morality (albeit a fuzzy thing); and if the early Confucians were overlooking it, then pooh to them. But I don’t think that to be thinking about something one has to have a clear and accurate account of it, or be thinking about it in the abstract, or attend to distinctions between it and nearby or similar things. Take, for example, social mores. In general, the opinions of a person’s society have a great deal of moral authority for her, both because of their epistemic authority about how one should live (a question that is hard to handle by oneself), and because respect for others is part of morality. The distinction between “the mores say I should do X” and “morally I should do X” is often academic, especially for those of us agents who don’t have independent proofs of moral theorems. Or as one might say, obeying social mores is a prima facie duty. It’s not prima facie the whole of morality, and sometimes it’s even immoral. The same is true of not-stealing, not-lying, and not-killing; and the same is true of etiquette and “simple obedience” (assuming that Hansen never meant to claim that early Confucians were confusing morality with uncritical obedience to anyone and everyone). Suppose a Confucian sometimes seems to elide morality with social mores, sometimes with etiquette, and sometimes with critical obedience to the authorities. If the kinds of occasion for which she seems to elide morality with X or with Y are the kinds of occasions when morality tends to line up with X or with Y, respectively, then I want to say the Confucian isn’t making a mistake of the blurring kind.

    The enterprise of working out a general account or fundamental principle of morality depends for all its authority on the premise that it is not exactly necessary. That is, it depends on the idea that we can be genuinely on the scent of morality before having worked out an articulate general concept of it. One way to help a young person catch the scent of morality is to show her e.g. the Ten Commandments (especially Luther’s version), or Benjamin Franklin’s list of virtues (above), or the Analects, and say: “That sort of thing.” Moral philosophers tend to test their general theories by whether they accord with our moral opinions on the humbler level of such lists. Theorists then ought to grant that we can do good serious moral thinking about how to live without hanging our conclusions from a completely general account of morality. Can we do much of our serious moral thinking well by deriving our conclusions from a unified theory? I think that’s an open question.

    I think it’s pretty widely agreed that if Smith has to choose between feeding her starving child and feeding two starving children of strangers, her stronger moral duty is to her own child. (Scott, I think that when Hansen talks about Confucian “partiality,” what he means is not a sharp limit—Lees count and Randolphs don’t count—but rather something that weakens with distance and never reaches zero, like gravity.) That is to say, below the level of the most abstract theory, even utilitarians tend to think we should be partial. People defend utilitarianism by trying to show that it endorses partiality in practice. So insofar as the Confucians weren’t trying to work out a fundamental theory of morality, I don’t see why their partiality should suggest that they were making a mistake about morality, even if utilitarianism is true.

    Suppose Confucius did emphasize the Golden Rule as his main overall guide. That looks to me like evidence that he was really thinking about morality, as Hansen thinks he was (main quote, above). But Hansen cites it as evidence that Confucius believed in fundamental impartiality, and I don’t know how it would be such evidence. A fundamentally partial (but perfectly universal) conception might be: “Morality is to care for and respect people in proportion to their social distance from oneself.” Is that in conflict with the Golden Rule? I don’t see it offhand. How would the argument go, from Confucius’ endorsement of the GR to his endorsement of impartiality? Perhaps the argument is entirely focused on impartiality not between one’s family and strangers, but rather between oneself and others. If Analects 6.30 said, “In aiming at advancement, don’t aim at your own advancement any more than at others’ advancement,” then I’d see the argument. But 6.30 and the GR don’t say that sort of thing. Granted, whatever the GR is supposed to mean, the GR doesn’t directly articulate; but to my mind it isn’t supposed to suggest self/other impartiality. Some altruism, sure.

    Scott, regarding the claim that “clan instincts are the foundation of morality,” I think it can mean many things. A “foundation,” for example, can be a root cause or a basis of justification. And by “morality” one might mean the correct ways, the moral opinions people actually have, a society’s practices of considering and enforcing such opinion, etc.

    Also – consider that there are very different correct ways to define “circle”: by a sum-of-the-squares equation, or as “points equidistant from a point in a plane,” or as “the smallest-perimeter figure with a given area,” or by examples, or in terms of a smooth-rolling test. Similarly, it seems to me, there might be very different correct ways to define morality: as what’s right simpliciter, or by some specification of its content such as the Golden Rule. Now, if you asked what is the root cause of there being something that is right simpliciter, I guess I’d have to answer that it’s the fact that there are sentient agents who have some knowledge of sentient agents, or something like that. And a crucial part of that knowledge comes by way of mirror neurons, which is some chunk of what someone might mean by “clan instincts,” so clan instincts do sort of come in. If you asked what is the root cause of the fact that what’s right simpliciter is to act by the Golden Rule, the answer might be different. Or you could ask about the root cause of moral opinion, or of practices of altruism bound up with moral opinion, or something like that. I’m not sure what sense of the word “morality” Hansen was using when he said that its purpose is to be more constant and reliable than clan instincts.

    (Maybe Hansen meant that morality (in some sense) is a social invention designed to serve the ends that clan instincts aim at more reliably than those instincts do, by way of some kind of greater “constancy;” rather as good nutritional advice may be designed to serve the ends that our gustatory instincts aim at better than those instincts do. What are the ends of our clan instincts?)
    I want to return to the thin concept of “morality” sort of articulated in the first paragraph of this comment. One might argue that there isn’t such a thing as morality so understood, as follows: “Suppose an excellent doctor, doing her best and making no mistake, prescribed a pill that by some fluke that couldn’t have been anticipated was deadly to her patient. The doctor’s choice of that pill was morally unimpeachable, but objectively bad. Therefore what’s morally good or right is not what is objectively good, or good simpliciter, or right simpliciter. And since morality (if there is such a thing) must by definition be objectively good or right simpliciter, there is therefore no such thing as morality.” To this my own answer would be: “Moral goodness is primarily a feature of courses of action (and of things similar to or closely connected with courses of action, such as character traits or tax codes). Most centrally, it’s a feature of things qua chosen. Moral goodness is not objective goodness, like the goodness of prescribing the pill that would have saved the patient. Rather, moral goodness is goodness so far as the relevant decider can reasonably know or reasonably guess. That’s fuzzy, but it’s not an arbitrary qualification. It’s something really central to decision; it’s in some sense the objectively right standard. And if that is right, then our biological and psychological nature helps carve the shape of what is morally required of us, by helping shape our capacities and needs: shaping our capacities for surmising what would be good to do (e.g. that respect is a core epistemic tool), and shaping what sorts of conduct and outcome (such as respectful treatment) would in fact be good for us and our neighbors.

    Steve, sort of on your last remark about Mohism — I have heard Derek Parfit use the phrase “morally good” to try to pin down and communicate the idea of objective intrinsic goodness of results (the idea that appears in such claims as “Bentham thought pleasure is the only thing that is intrinsically good”). I think such usage of ‘moral’, if not ephemeral, would show that the user has lost touch with the word ‘moral’. I wonder whether utilitarianism and its ilk might tend to interfere with one’s mastery of the word, pulling the word toward the kind of objective goodness that characterizes the pill that would actually have healed, and pulling one away from the common sense assumptions that help us keep the scent.

    Comment by Bill Haines | June 6, 2010 | Reply

    • Hi Bill;

      re: “I think such usage of ‘moral’, if not ephemeral, would show that the user has lost touch with the word ‘moral’.”

      I’m not sure the issue is really about competence with the term ‘moral,’ given its many uses. Rather, your point seems to be substantive, namely a doubt about whether moral goodness could be intrinsic and not necessarily dependent on some quality of an action. Actually, more specifically, your doubt is about whether moral goodness could be an intrinsic feature of a state of affairs or a result — after all, there are other kinds of things that some people think of as having moral goodness as an intrinsic feature not necessarily dependent on actions — think of the virtue theory view of character or persons being morally good. Or perhaps that also sounds like a mistake to you.

      Comment by Manyul Im | June 7, 2010 | Reply

      • My claim about the connection between ‘morality’ and actions — courses of action rather — was this: “Moral goodness is primarily a feature of courses of action (and of things similar to or closely connected with courses of action, such as character traits or tax codes).” So calling traits of character morally good doesn’t sound like a mistake to me. Still, maybe I’m off the mark, putting the word too far away from persons.

        Are you saying that people think virtue and/or being a good person isn’t necessarily dependent on actions? Are you thinking of e.g. Aristotle’s idea that since virtue is a disposition, in principle “possession of virtue seems actually compatible with being asleep, or with lifelong inactivity”? Or is your thought that the efficient cause of virtue needn’t be actions?

        DP’s use would imply that the pleasure of a well-fed amoeba on a warm day a billion years ago was “morally good.” Does that really seem OK to you?

        But you’re right, the ultimate issue is not mastery of the term. The issue was whether there is something about utilitarianism that tends to alienate one from the concept of morality, hide the scent, specifically . The observation about the term was a suggestive jot of evidence in that direction, in context of the larger argument about objectivity versus the epistemic limits in agency.

        Comment by Bill Haines | June 7, 2010 | Reply

      • I’m sorry Manyul – I probably misunderstood your final point, thinking that you meant “think of the view that virtues or persons can be morally good” when you really meant “think of the view that these can have moral goodness that isn’t just a reference to the moral goodness or rightness of the courses of action they generate.” So I’ll try to address the latter.

        If you meant “…or are disposed to generate,” or “…or are such as to generate,” then the view becomes less obviously true. But I do think that maybe I should have said morality is focused on decision (or even one or another thing I don’t have clear terms for: “practical thinking” or “will”).

        The core of what I want to say is that moral goodness, while distinct from goodness simpliciter, has some kind of absoluteness about it that gives it a noticeable claim on people more or less independently of their culture, like thirst and arithmetic. I want to say that ‘morally’ applied to ‘good’ is a qualifier that makes special reference to deliberating or deciding or the thinking side of agency. Of course one might ask: “What kinds of agents? Are humans to be the standard, and if so why?” Or: “Doesn’t this idea depend on the culturally relative notion of agency as centering on distinct actions/decisions?” I don’t know. It seems somehow harder to find a governing role for verbally articulate thinking in agency insofar as we try to conceive agency without distinct decisions. (I’m told E. O. Wilson likes to say in class: “What ants and human beings have in common is that they each involve highly organized society produced without the use of reason.”)

        It seems to me that (at least in certain kinds of context) duties toward strangers might be central to discussion of morality in the way that small isolated systems are central to discussion of physics: not because one thinks they are all of it.

        Comment by Bill Haines | June 9, 2010 | Reply

  12. Hello,

    I work mainly in phil language and mind, but am trying to make a case for the cultural universality of the notion of metaphor or figurative language. Clearly, there are lots of instances of what we would consider figurative language in Chinese philosophy. But is there any explicit recognition of a distinction between figurative and literal language, or any explicit theorizing about the nature of figurative language? So far as I know, the earliest explicit theorizing on the topic in Western philosophy is from Aristotle, who claimed that metaphors were elliptical comparisons. Any suggestions are much appreciated.

    Comment by Mark Phelan | June 13, 2010 | Reply

    • Hi Mark,

      Edward Slingerland has written much about conceptual metaphor in ancient China. I don’t believe he discusses explicit theorizing on metaphor by the ancient Chinese, however.
      http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/eslingerland/index.html

      See his articles page (http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/eslingerland/articles.html) for a number of his papers: some may be of interest. The paper “CONCEPTIONS OF THE SELF IN THE ZHUANGZI: CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR ANALYSIS AND COMPARATIVE THOUGHT” deals specifically with metaphors. He mostly builds off the work of Lakoff and Johnson. Hope this helps some.

      Comment by Scott "Baopu" Barnwell | June 14, 2010 | Reply

    • Mark, Scott’s probably right to send you in Slingerland’s direction. Edward (goes by “Ted”) is a friendly scholar and would probably love to talk metaphor with you.

      As far as the Chinese material itself, there’s an ongoing discussion in the early Chinese material about analogies — for example, analogies for human moral development, or “nature” — and what they can and can’t prove about their targeted theses, but that’s about the extent of it as far as I can think of. The locus for explicit discussion of analogies and argument by analogy is the work of the Later Mohists (4th-3rd cent BCE), whose work is terse and difficult to decipher without some bold reconstruction of the somewhat corrupted texts. Nonetheless, A.C. Graham and Chad Hansen have done some interesting work along the latter lines. Chris Fraser has a Stanford Encyclopedia piece that gives a nice summary and all the references you might need here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mohist-canons/ .

      Comment by Manyul Im | June 14, 2010 | Reply

    • That’s an extremely interesting question, Mark, because it highlights the question whether early Chinese thought had a concept of the literal. (I think you’re asking about early Chinese thought, or at least Chinese thought uninfluenced by Western (Indian?) thought?)

      I think there might be a difficulty about arguing that something is culturally universal on the grounds that it shows up in philosophy. The way people use ‘literally’ these days, one might almost wonder whether popular culture has the distinction at all. But maybe you’re asking about philosophy here only because you’re asking a philosophy blog. A problem about relying on the Mohists is that, so far as Chinese culture is concerned, they were arguably just a brief flash in the pan, early forgotten.

      The place I’d look for a discussion of metaphor is Chinese literary theory, or (failing that) Chinese literary practice. There are various conventions of parallelism in early Chinese poetry, one of which (to my ignorant and unpracticed eye) looks something like this: “Alongside your main point, say something about scenery that is analogous to your main point.” But maybe you would want to say that such a convention only shows a concept of analogy, not a concept of metaphor.

      Consider two images one might have of the form of the meaning of a categorematic term: a line drawn around a class of cases, and a model having similars. One might of course have a combination of these views, e.g. thinking that the way a word draws a line is by picking out a model to which only some things are similar. Maybe Plato had both views at once, the first being especially reflected in the early dialogues and the second leading him in his middle period to think that for each significant term there is in fact only one case that really falls inside the line.

      It seems to me offhand that the metaphor/literal distinction needs something like the corral view, the line-around-cases view.

      In the early 1980s two fat mass market paperbacks on Russia came out at about the same time, by NYT and WaPo reporters who had each been stationed in Moscow for a few years. Each reported a conversation with a man in the street who used a pair of images to compare Western and Russian images of law. The man likened Western law to a flat pan with vertical walls, within which a ball could roll around freely. Russian law was likened in one book to a broad cone-shaped pan in which the ball was encouraged to stay in the middle. The other book gave a more complex and restricting shape.

      The image of the closed figure within which there is equality seems to me important to Western images of meaning and law and political organization, and even to Western images of geometry. Not so in China. I think Chinese culture tends to make similarly wide use of a different image: that of patterns of crosshatching and/or branching lines, which can serve as a model in the sense that it can be replicated=extended. Think of family lines, human relationships, roads and rivers, models and similars, master and pupil, and the visual quality of Chinese writing. I don’t think this absurdly simple general comparison is original to me, but I don’t know who has discussed it.

      (The comparison suggests that in China one might find a third image of meaning: an extended pattern. Chinese doesn’t have singulars and plurals; instead one always uses counting-words where that matters: “three slab of beef.” Chad Hansen has argued that early Chinese thought tends to conceive the reference of a noun like ‘horse’ not as a class of cases, but as a stuff—horse—of which there are chunks picked out by counting-words.)

      I could be wrong, but I think I read in something by Chris Fraser that where early Chinese philosophy is worried about the general problem of distinguishing whether a term applies to X or doesn’t, it tends to think especially of the special problem of deciding which of two opposite terms to assign X to. (Chris?) That special problem will drive one more slowly than other cases will to the corral.

      For discussion of the imagery behind an influential Chinese quasi-equivalent of ‘logos’/’eidos’, see the discussion in this blog of whether “li” is best translated as “pattern” or “coherence,” here: http://warpweftandway.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/review-of-sagehood/

      Comment by Bill Haines | June 14, 2010 | Reply

    • Thanks for the leads. Slingerland’s work looks like a promising place to start. Bill, you’re right that I’m only asking about whether the distinction shows up in early Chinese philosophy because I’m asking a philosophy blog. Any reference to a distinction between the literal and the figurative (or perhaps even just the poetic) would be useful for my purposes. To that end, any recommendations of works of literary theory to start with would be much appreciated. Very interesting idea that early Chinese thought might have lacked a concept of the literal! Any ideas about how to make the case for that?

      Comment by Mark Phelan | June 14, 2010 | Reply

      • Hi Mark,

        Hagop asked me to weigh in on this question from the literary point of view. Apologies in advance if I am repeating something you have already heard. There is a *long* tradition stretching back to the Mao preface to the Classic of Poetry (which is a synthesis of Warring States thought) drawing a distinction between three types of literary image: fu 赋 (narrative description), bi 比 (simile/metaphor) and xing 兴 (affective image). There has been much ink spilled in the exegetical tradition trying to tease out the nuances of these terms, especially the last one. A good place to start in English would be Steve Owen’s *Readings in Chinese Literary Thought*. The go-to Chinese source on the topic would be 郭绍虞. 中国文学批评史. He also has a good sourcebook of primary sources that discuss the topic.

        Comment by Graham Sanders | June 14, 2010 | Reply

      • Thanks Graham! That was incredibly helpful. I picked up Owen’s book today, and am going to check out a fifth century text translated as _The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons_ tomorrow. Just the stuff I needed.

        Comment by Mark Phelan | June 15, 2010 | Reply

        • Cool! I’m glad you found the references useful.

          Comment by Graham | June 16, 2010 | Reply

    • Hi Mark,

      I’m afraid that my suspicions are being echoed in some of these responses–that there might not be any explicit distinction made (or theorizing about) the literal and the figurative in the classical texts.

      But Bill has proposed an interesting possible explanatory account: no concept of literal –> no concept of figurative. Maybe you only have a concept of the figurative if you have a concept of the literal.

      You can then posit a counterfactual as a hypothesis: if cultures have a clear conception of the literal, then they will have a clear conception of the metaphorical (or figurative); if not, they are unlikely to. This is still a universal (though perhaps not the one you were first after).

      As for why the classical Chinese might not have a concept of
      the literal (as Bill hypothesizes)… *shrugging for now*

      Comment by hagop sarkissian | June 14, 2010 | Reply

    • Mark and Hagop, it seems to me that the concept of the literal is little more than the flip side of the concept of the metaphorical. (One could also contrast the literal with the hyperbolic and the sarcastic, but those distinctions seem to me very minor in comparison.) So I guess the main way to make a case that early China lacked the concept of the literal would be to look for a Chinese text noting that some uses of language are merely metaphorical, and fail to find one!

      As for Chinese literary theory, one group of people who might know the best places to look is the literary people at this list:
      http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/LIST.htm
      though the official focus of the list is the most recent hundred years.

      Comment by Bill Haines | June 14, 2010 | Reply

      • I think the argument could be made that they in fact had a concept of figurative language (in contrast to literal language). For instance,

        Therefore the sage kings cultivated and fashioned the lever of righteousness and the ordering of ceremonial usages, in order to regulate the feelings of men. Those feelings were the field (to be cultivated by) the sage kings. They fashioned the rules of ceremony to plough it. They set forth the principles of righteousness with which to plant it. They instituted the lessons of the school to weed it. They made love the fundamental subject by which to gather all its fruits, and they employed the training in music to give repose (to the minds of learners). Thus, rules of ceremony are the embodied expression of what is right. (Liji, Liyun)

        They perhaps had terms for it: bi 比, yu 喻, si 似, and xiang 象 are contenders.

        But they did not explicitly theorize about such a distinction, although looking into some of the commentaries in passages where these terms are used might provide useful.

        Comment by Agui | June 16, 2010 | Reply

    • Mark, you might want to look at or address Hall and Ames, “Thinking From the Han,” pp. 135-142, for an argument against of the existence of a distinction between literal and figurative language in the classical Chinese tradition.

      Comment by Amit | June 25, 2010 | Reply

  13. Does anyone here know of any blogs about feminism or gender in China specifically? My Chinese is still poor so for now I am looking for English sites and not really finding anything.

    Comment by Rae | June 13, 2010 | Reply

  14. This is sort of an announcement. A new entry at Stanford has been published on Ethics in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism by Charles Goodman. Here’s the link:
    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-indian-buddhism/

    Comment by Scott | June 24, 2010 | Reply

  15. Yarr!

    Does anyone know where I can find a copy of the Wuxing (五行) text online?

    More generally, is there a repository for electronic editions of ‘recently excavated’ texts?

    Much obliged,
    H

    Comment by hagop sarkissian | June 28, 2010 | Reply

  16. The best place is CHANT:
    http://www.chant.org/
    But you will need a subscription. It’s well worth it, imo.

    Comment by Scott | June 28, 2010 | Reply

    • In the meantime, I could send you a Word document of it.

      Comment by Scott | June 28, 2010 | Reply

      • That would be great, Scott! h.sarkissian–at–gmail.com

        Comment by hagop sarkissian | June 28, 2010 | Reply

  17. Not sure if this is the place, to put it, but this headline rather caught my eye. I’m afraid the comment piece is very shallow, but I’ve extracted quotes which seem germane to the Confucian love of ceremony.

    It’s pretty rare to see statements like this in British political life. While in the USA, values can seem to be strong political fodder, and people can represent values, much of the political language in Britain is very managerial, facts-and-figures. We don’t lack for ceremony, but we don’t like to talk about it much.

    Why a ceremonial figurehead can mean progress
    As newly appointed deputy mayoress for Ealing, I can see the value of pomp and circumstance in local government
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/28/mayoress-ealing-local-government

    ” in recent weeks I have become deputy mayoress of the London borough of Ealing. The result has been an eye-opener as some of the vestiges of pomp, ceremony and patronage seem to be alive and well – despite our 13-year entanglement with the non-hierarchical, New Labour-induced New Britain.”

    “I haven’t been given a job description and my role is unremunerated, but there are a couple of perks. If the mayor and mayoress are not using it, the deputy mayor and I can command a Jag with the council crest on top complete with driver for official business. The mayor and his deputy even have old-school Speaker of the Commons-style robes. I get a sold silver version of the borough crest on a chain for wearing to functions. When I had it attached round my neck it for the first time by the mayor’s secretary in the mayor’s parlour (where else?) I was asked if I had a safe in my house.”

    “The continuing of the mayoral team, to whom the correct form of address is “your worshipful”, and all their staff might seem somewhat anachronistic against this backdrop of “hard times”, but there is an argument that its pomp and splendour might be a good thing for people to rally round. The mayor’s alternative title is “first citizen of the borough”, which on my calculations makes me fourth, but there are some important functions that come with the post, such as representing the borough outside its boundaries and charity fundraising.”

    Comment by Phil Hand | June 28, 2010 | Reply

  18. Hi,
    I have been looking at a well-known passage in the Mengzi and wondering about something.
    In 2A6 (3.6) we find
    惻隱之心，仁之端也；羞惡之心，義之端也；辭讓之心，禮之端也；是非之心，智之端也。
    I can easily understand that this ‘heart’ of comisseration/compassion is the first sign (sprout) of Ren, but I am trying to understand the idea behind the 羞惡之心 being the first sign (sprout) of Yi. Xiue/Xiuwu is translated as “shame and disgrace” by Dobson and “shame” by Lau. “According to cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict, shame is a violation of cultural or social values …” (Wikipedia). If this is true, although shame is a natural emotion of all humans, what we are ashamed of depends on social conventions. As feeling of compassion lead to the virtue of Ren, it doesn’t seem to me that the feeling of shame leads to the virtue of Yi, but rather that Yi is the trigger for shame. Anyone have any thoughts to share?

    The ‘definition’ of Li makes some sense (in 6A6 it is written as 恭敬之心 and not 辭讓之心).
    The line about Zhi makes some sense, but I’m not sure I follow that either (is Mengzi claiming that we are born knowing right and wrong, or, alternatively, what to affirm and deny?)

    TIA
    ~ Scott

    Comment by Scott "Bao Pu" Barnwell | July 19, 2010 | Reply

    • Bryan Van Norden has an article on this:

      “The Emotion of Shame and the Virtue of Righteousness in Mencius,” Dao 2:1 (Winter 2002), pp. 45-77. (Written for, and pre-published with the permission of, David Wong and Kwong-loi Shun, eds., Confucian Ethics: A Comparative Study of Self, Autonomy and Community [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004], pp. 148-82.)

      Comment by Agui | July 19, 2010 | Reply

  19. I was wondering if anyone had a copy to share of a paper by Joel Kupperman called “Why Ethical Philosophy Needs to Be Comparative” from the Cambridge journal Philosophy?

    Comment by Scott "Bao Pu" Barnwell | July 21, 2010 | Reply

    • I have a feeling you’ll find one in your inbox.

      Comment by hagop sarkissian | July 21, 2010 | Reply

    • In case others were also intrigued — I hadn’t seen this essay yet — here is the abstract:

      “Principles can seem as entrenched in moral experience as Kant thinks space, time, and the categories are in human experience of the world. However not all cultures have such a view. Classical Indian and Chinese philosophies treat modification of the self as central to ethics. Decisions in particular cases and underlying principles are much less discussed.

      Ethics needs comparative philosophy in order not to be narrow in its concerns. A broader view can give weight to how people sometimes can change who they are, in order to lead better lives.”

      (Philosophy (2010), 85: 185-200)

      Comment by Steve Angle | July 21, 2010 | Reply

  20. Has anyone had experience with, or own copies of, Chinese philosophy texts (in Chinese) in e-Reader formats? Is it too soon at this point to be looking for these? Kindle and/or PDF formats were what I was interested in personally.

    Comment by Manyul Im | July 31, 2010 | Reply

    • I’m glad you brought this up, Manyul. I’m interested in this too. As a stop-gap measure, I’ve been making my own PDF’s from various online repositories, but this has been labor intensive and oftentimes it’s not possible to change the format much to optimize viewing.

      Comment by hagop sarkissian | August 1, 2010 | Reply

      • WordPerfect allows a kind of “columns” that MSWord doesn’t allow, useful for making bilingual documents: in WordPerfect you can arrange things so that pushing material in column A downward shoves it into the top of column A on the next page, not the top of column B on the same page.

        Comment by Bill Haines | August 2, 2010 | Reply

  21. I was contacted by “Mike” with the following question. Any suggestions?

    A peculiar phrase in Sanskrit, “anugacchatu pravaaham”, supposedly meaning “go with the flow”, has recently come to my attention. Upon contacting a Sanskrit expert I was advised that “the flow” does not seem to have any (Hindu) scriptural basis.

    Upon further examination I came to the conclusion that  “go with the flow” must have its origins in China, possibly with 莊子, to whom the following popular quotation is attributed:

    “Do not struggle. Go with the flow of things, and you will find yourself at one with the mysterious unity of the Universe.” – Chuang Tzu

    Would you say that the above is just another pseudo-quote, so common on the Web nowadays? Or is it authentic?

    If the latter, do you know the original Chinese quote? Or perhaps remember it partially?

    If you could just give me a few keywords that you believe appear in the original Chinese, it would help me greatly – my Chinese is extremely limited and I am unable to find via Google what I am looking for…

    Thank You!

    Mike

    Comment by Manyul Im | August 26, 2010 | Reply

    • I think it might be a pseudo-quote.

      Comment by Scott | August 27, 2010 | Reply

  22. Thank you for your help so far!

    Let me also mention the following quote (it seems much less ‘pseudo’):

    “It (Dao) flows through all things, inside and outside, and returns, to the origin of all things.”

    Whereas in the previous quote (“Do not struggle. Go with the flow of things, and you will find yourself at one with the mysterious unity of the Universe.”) the “go with the flow” bit seems to be a translation for 無為 or something similar, in the present quote clearly an altogether different word would have to be used, a word that can stand for “flow” in a literal sense…

    Comment by Mike | August 28, 2010 | Reply

    • Laozi 34 says that the Dao flows (氾) to the left or right.
      Laozi 25 says that the Dao existed prior to Heaven & Earth, can be regarded as the Mother of the world and that it travels far (遠) and returns (反).
      The Mawangdui version of Laozi 62 says that the Dao flows into (注) the myriad living things.
      Laozi 4 says that the Dao is a mysterious watery abyss (淵) which seems to be the ancestor of the myriad things.

      Again, it sounds Daoist, but doesn’t quite match anything exactly.

      Comment by Scott | August 28, 2010 | Reply

    • Mike, I’m curious about the likelihood of the influence from Lao-Zhuang tradition into Sanskrit texts. What sort of dating do you estimate for the piece with that Sanskrit phrase, “anugacchatu pravaaham”? And in what text does that phrase come up?

      Comment by Manyul Im | August 28, 2010 | Reply

    • Mike, here are two quotes from the Outer Chapters of the Zhuangzi. I’ve taken them from Donald Sturgeon’s “Chinese Text Project” site, and used his numbers, but messed with the translations there:

      Tian Zi-fang 4
      老聃曰：“…夫水之於汋也，無為而才自然矣。至人之於德也，不修而物不能離焉，若天之自高，地之自厚，日月之自明，夫何修焉！”
      “Lao Dan said, “…Look at the water that flows [汋]: it does nothing [無為], and thus is itself so. So with the perfect man and virtue: He does not self-cultivate/carve [修], and nothing can depart from him: like heaven’s being itself high, earth’s being itself solid, the sun and moon’s being themselves bright: what self-cultivation/carving is there?”

      Knowledge Rambling in the North 2:
      天地有大美而不言，四時有明法而不議，萬物有成理而不說。聖人者，原天地之美而達萬物之理。是故至人無為，大聖不作，觀於天地之謂也。
      Heaven and Earth proceed in the most admirable way, but say nothing; the four seasons observe the clearest laws, but they do not discuss; all things have their complete and distinctive constitutions, but they say nothing. The sages trace out the admirable operations of Heaven and Earth, and reach to and understand the essences of all things; and thus it is that the Perfect Man (is said to) do nothing and the Greatest Sage to originate nothing. That is their intimacy/kinship [觀] with Heaven-and-Earth.

      Possible connections between Zhuangzi and Csikszentmihalyi’s brand of “flow” are discussed here:
      http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2007/03/flow-and-not-so-skillful-zhuangzi.html
      http://warpweftandway.wordpress.com/2008/04/03/velleman-frankfurt-and-zhuangzi/
      http://warpweftandway.wordpress.com/2008/04/13/wuwei-%E7%84%A1%E7%82%BA-what-does-it-mean/

      Comment by Bill Haines | August 29, 2010 | Reply

      • Some odd translations there Bill. E.g., carve 修, trace out 原, intimacy/kinship 觀, complete and distinctive constitutions 成理, essences 理.

        Comment by Scott | August 29, 2010 | Reply

        • Oops, I carelessly confused 觀 (look at, watch, observe) with 親 (kin, associate closely with). That’s a really bad mistake, wasting other people’s time.

          “Trace out 原” and “complete and distinctive constitutions
          are Legge’s,” and I think they’re not terrible for current purposes.

          “Essences 理” in this context is, I think, as good as anything.

          I translated 修 not as “carve” but as “self-cultivate/carve”, because it’s traditionally rendered as “cultivate” or “self-cultivation,” but I’m under the impression that the root metaphor has something to do with carved pattern or ornament (and that it has nothing to do with agriculture). I wanted to draw attention to the fact that at the level of discourse at which “wu wei” might be rendered as “non-struggle,” 修 is in the same family.

          I wanted to try to find the passage(s) in the Zhuangzi that look least unlikely to have inspired the purported quote Mike asked about. Once my bad mistake is corrected, there isn’t much reason for including the latter passage.

          Thanks, Scott; sorry, Mike.

          Comment by Bill Haines | August 29, 2010 | Reply

  23. Thanks everyone, it’s been great help. I will be visiting again, possibly with some info on Sanskrit “flow”…

    Comment by MIKE | September 9, 2010 | Reply

  24. Hi folks. Great blog.

    I am putting together a class on the influence of Chinese Philosophy on (mostly Early) Modern Philosophy (reversing the direction of flow so that students can realize that interest in Chinese Philosophy has actually a relatively long history in the West). It’s part of our core interdisciplinary humanities program, so it’s really about Modern Thought (which means it’ll include things like Jung’s interest in Daoism).

    While I have had a pretty easy time with Confucianism (even successfully hunting down a digital reprint of the 17th Century text “The Morals of Confucius”) and to some extent Daoism and Chinese Buddhism, I have not been able to learn anything about the history of the reception of Mozi in the West. My impression was that missionaries would have been very interested in his writings (at least on jianai), but I have nothing to back it up.

    All of this leads to my question, can anyone tell me when the ideas of Mozi entered the West (either in a summation like “The Morals of Confucius” or a translation) and specifically into English-speaking nations (since I could assign that text to the student)? And, an even bigger help would be any examples of Western philosophers (or famous intellectuals) from the 16th to early 20th Centuries who make reference to Mozi in their arguments (positively or negatively)?

    I’d like to give the students the widest possible exposure to Chinese philosophy, but since it is a course that falls under the program “The Search for Values in Light of Western History and Religion” I need an “in” to be able to include Mozi.

    Thanks for any help you might be able to offer.

    Comment by Andrew Terjesen | October 11, 2010 | Reply

    • Here are a couple of things that might be useful, though in a limited way. Mozi is mentioned by Mencius (3B9), so there would always have been curiosity by early Western students (mostly Jesuits) of the Mencius about what Mozi stood for.

      David Mungello had a piece in Philosophy East and West 28:2 (1978) about a Jesuit, Joseph Premare (1666-1736), who quotes 3B9 in one of his writings about the superiority of Confucianism to other extant movements in China.

      According to Julia Ching (also in PEW 28:2), Kant had no apparent knowledge of Mozi in his dismissals of Chinese moral philosophy.

      There were revivals of interest in Mozi in China in the Qing, so I would be shocked if there were no Jesuit comments at all about Mohism. I know that doesn’t give you any specific references. (Teaching at a Jesuit institution, I wish I had the luxury of taking time to comb through all the Jesuit writings on Chinese philosophy, but my Latin is very rusty and who has that kind of time?)

      Comment by Manyul Im | October 11, 2010 | Reply

  25. In his introduction to his new translation, Ian Johnston has a couple of helpful comments along these lines. It would seem that one of the earliest analyses of Mozi is by a German, Ernst Faber, in 1877. A complete translation (the first it seems) is done by a German fellow, Alfred Forke, in 1922. Burton Watson, in his introduction, mentions an English translation from 1929. It would seem highly unlikely that any Western reference to Mozi would be found before the turn of the 19th and 20th century, if then.

    Comment by Sam | October 11, 2010 | Reply

  26. Here’s this from F. Mote’s book, Intellectual Foundations of China (p. 83):

    “Nevertheless Mohism seemed to hold a special message for Chinese in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it has seen a curious revival of importance in the intellectual heritage of modern China. It appealed to Christian missionaries and to those influential Chinese modernizers who were influenced by Christian and Western thought, because its doctrine of universal love seemed akin to Christian doctrine. Early missionaries sometimes used this Chinese precedent to make modern Chinese pagans take Christianity seriously and to validate an outlandish doctrine by showing that respectable ancient Chinese had said something not dissimilar….”

    Comment by Sam | October 11, 2010 | Reply

  27. I would like to write my masters thesis in Chinese philosophy of language but my country has no experts in this field. Could someone help me in selecting the topic and related readings? Of course, I have some preferences and interests in the field but I d like to discuss it via email if anyone is willing to help me.

    Comment by Ivana | October 28, 2010 | Reply

    • Hi Ivana; my apologies — your question has slipped through the cracks. The first place I would look for topics and sources would be two pieces in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by my fellow blogger, Chris Fraser: “The School of Names” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/school-names/) and “Mohist Canons” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mohist-canons/) — the latter has a section called “Philosophy of Language.” There are excellent bibliographies at the end of each of those, for further reference. That should be a good start. Please come back with more questions, if you think it would be of assistance to you.

      Comment by Manyul Im | November 4, 2010 | Reply

      • Thank you so much for commenting. I read these articles and also some other overviews. Now I am reading some articles from the Journal of Chinese philosophy and when I finish that I ll have a lot of qs. Hope you will be kind and help me. Cheers!

        Comment by Ivana | November 4, 2010 | Reply

  28. I’m conveying a question here from Joshua Harwood, friend of our blog and author of his own blog The Yangist, who is currently abroad in China. He asks:

    In my collection of Taiwanese philosophical literature, I found perhaps the most relevant book to my “hardcore analytic” musings, and I am looking for any good leads that can help me contact the author. His name is Fu-tseng Liu, and he writes a lot on Wittgenstein and Laozi. The book “Between Philosophy and Language” says that he’s been a professor at Kainan since 2004, but I haven’t found his name listed there. I assume that he’s an emeritus from his estimated age, but I’m not sure.

    Do you or does anyone at the Warp, Weft, and Way community have any current contact information, and does someone know his interest in engaging with aspiring Analytic Sinophilosophers?

    Comment by Manyul Im | November 20, 2010 | Reply

  29. Anyone read Searching for the Way: Theory of Knowledge in Premodern and Modern China?
    http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-962-996-327-9/searching-for-the-way

    Comment by Scott "Bao Pu" Barnwell | December 5, 2010 | Reply

    • Hi Scott, I haven’t really read it, though I have it and have read around in it a bit. It’s a fascinating book, intent on showing that there are alternatives to the western model of conceptualizing epistemology. After a crisp introduction that covers various pre-Qin approaches (and very briefly touches on Song neo-Confucianism), it spend about 80 pages on Ming and Qing theorists, and then 200 pages on 20th-century thinkers.

      Comment by Steve Angle | December 8, 2010 | Reply

  30. Hello everyone. I’m doing some independent study on the history of moral philosophy in Imperial China, and I’m writing a paper on the concept of ren (仁), trying to learn how the the concept has evolved through time and through different viewpoints. For starters, I’m already knee-deep in pre-Qin texts, as well as some Dong Zhongshu, Han Yu and a couple passages from the 朱子語類. Anyone have any suggestions on post-Qin primary or secondary sources in Chinese or English?

    Comment by MF | February 24, 2011 | Reply

    • Hi MF,

      Since virtually ever thinker discusses ren, suggesting primary sources is difficult! For secondary sources, the classic essay on this is:

      The Evolution of the Confucian Concept Jên
      Wing-Tsit Chan
      Philosophy East and West
      Vol. 4, No. 4 (Jan., 1955), pp. 295-319
      Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1396741

      Also, on Zhu Xi in particular:

      Wing-tsit Chan, Chu Hsi: New Studies, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1989, 151-83.

      Also useful is:

      Irene Bloom, “Three Visions of Jen”, in Irene Bloom and Joshua A. Fogel (eds.), Meeting of Minds: Intellectual and Religious Interaction in East Asian Traditions of Thought, Columbia University Press, New York, 1996.

      For Neo-Confucians (esp. Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming, but also Cheng Hao), you might also look at my book Sagehood (Oxford, 2009); the index will point you to a number of discussions of ren.

      Comment by Steve Angle | February 27, 2011 | Reply

      • This looks like a bibliographical treasure trove for what I’m trying to do. Thank you very much for your response!

        Comment by MF | February 28, 2011 | Reply

  31. Any one have an idea of where to go for total character counts of texts such at the Lunyu, Mengzi, and Liji?

    Comment by Agui | March 23, 2011 | Reply

    • I don’t know of any place that lists character counts. I have Lunyu and Mengzi in Word and can give you counts with that. Don’t believe I have the whole Liji though.

      Comment by David Elstein | March 30, 2011 | Reply

  32. Where or how do I download the Chinese characters/script used on this blog? I have Windows XP 2002 (and am not very computer saavy).

    Comment by Patrick S. O'Donnell | May 25, 2011 | Reply

    • Do you have East Asian fonts enabled? I’d have thought that would give you any fonts you need. If you don’t, you can enable them through the Control Panel (through Language and Region settings, or something like that), but you need the installation disks to do it, I think.

      Comment by Dan Robins | May 25, 2011 | Reply

  33. Thank you Dan. It seems I do need a disk and am looking to see if I have it.

    Best wishes,
    Patrick

    Comment by Patrick S. O'Donnell | May 26, 2011 | Reply

  34. One thing I rarely see on the websites of scholars/professors, including the contributors here at WW&W, is any mention of who their teachers were. I usually find it helpful to understand their various publications to know if the writer was a student of Angus Graham, Roger Ames, Chad Hansen, Philip Ivanhoe, etc. Not being a professional in the field, I have little idea how much contact and influence their is not only between teacher and student, but also colleagues teaching in the same departments.

    Anyone have any comments? Would the contributors here be willing to share their influences?

    Comment by Scott "Bao Pu" Barnwell | May 30, 2011 | Reply

    • Hi Scott; I was a student of Donald Munro, though, speaking only for myself, I can’t say he influenced me so much. He was very hands-off until I had stuff for him; then he was mostly critical. I suppose that’s an influence. The person who influenced me more, as a scholar and philosopher, was Stephen Darwall, who was working on British moralists at the time.

      Comment by Manyul Im | May 30, 2011 | Reply

  35. Does anyone have any biographical information on Chen Guying 陳鼓應?

    TIA (thanks in advance)

    Comment by Scott "Bao Pu" Barnwell | June 1, 2011 | Reply

  36. This should do it: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/陳鼓應

    Comment by Agui | June 2, 2011 | Reply

  37. Two perhaps related questions: Are there many textile-related metaphors in early Chinese literature? And why is warp and weft in the title of this blog?

    Comment by Cherine Munkholt | June 9, 2011 | Reply

    • Hello Cherine; thanks for your question! The Chinese character for “classic of” is jing 經, as in the Yijing (Classic of Change), Daodejing (Classic of the Way and Influence), etc. The original meaning of the character is “warp.” You can see the evolution of the character’s form here. The image of the loom is more apparent in some of the character forms. We decided to call the blog Warp Weft and Way to reflect our hope that it would weave together strands of conversation about “the Way” or “ways” (dao 道) that are discussed in Chinese philosophy — not to mention that we liked the nice alliteration.

      The textile related metaphor that jumps to mind is from the Analects of Confucius, where Confucius says that his way has one thread running through it (Analects 4.15 – 子曰：“參乎！吾道一以貫之。”). That’s a weft reference, I think. There may be other metaphors, but none jump to mind right now.

      Comment by Manyul Im | June 9, 2011 | Reply

    • Hi Cherine. Just a quick follow-up. I got curious about the one thread reference in the Analects and did a brief check. The “thread” might be a reference to a “string” (subtle difference here), so not a weft, or weaving thread, reference. The etymology of the character guàn 貫 suggests a string for holding coins together, as one of its early meanings (see http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterEtymology.aspx?submitButton1=Etymology&characterInput=%E8%B2%AB ). However, I’m uncertain of the existence of coins with holes in Confucius’s time. Someone with some archaeology knowledge should chime in here; or you can find a coin expert to ask them. An additional complication is the dating of the Analects passage, which is likely to have been at least half a generation removed from his death. Actually, it might also be worth trying to find out what character the weft was referred to with in the Zhou Dynasty or Warring States Period.

      Comment by Manyul Im | June 22, 2011 | Reply

      • Thanks, shall pass on the coin query to some archaeologists I know. Not knowing Chinese myself, I cannot research the subject of Chinese textile metaphors adequately, but I do hope that either some of the readers of this blog or a future visiting scholar at our centre might do so. You mention string: just for your info., according to Elizabeth Barber, string technology (i.e. twisting strands of something together to acquire more strength) is one of the earliest human techniques, for instance seen on the string skirts of Palaeolithic statuettes. Another twist to this tale is something I have been pondering on ever since 2 visiting physicists (Bohr and Olsen) recently spoke at our centre on the comparison of the twisted strands of DNA to rope making- is it a mere coincidence, or do humans possess a cognitive predisposition towards this technique, as the biological stuff we are composed of and one of the earliest of all human techniques follow a somewhat similar pattern?

        Comment by Cherine Munkholt | June 23, 2011 | Reply

      • According to a Wikipedia article on ancient Chinese coins, there were coins with holes in the time Confucius would have lived; how accurate this is, I cannot verify. More fascinatingly, Sinologist Nicolas Standaert informs me of the opposite to jing, i.e. a word for weft, which from my online research (from the website http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Classics/jingbu.html) I can see is used metaphorically for writing that is less exalted than a classic: wei 纬

        Comment by Cherine Munkholt | July 6, 2011 | Reply

      • Thanks for the info, Cherine! (The traditional form of that character is: 緯)

        Comment by Manyul Im | July 6, 2011 | Reply

  38. Thanks so much for all this info. Shall follow this thread about Analects 4.15 and see where it leads…

    Having to proofread and translate large numbers of academic texts on textiles on a daily basis, one becomes aware of the textile-related metaphors that are used in everyday language. What is intriguing is how these metaphors appear in the various languages around the world, in what contexts, and if there are similarities. Paul Ricoeur (in the English translation to Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 246) could for example speak of “life itself a cloth woven of stories told”, and we do have the expression the “fabric of life” in English. It would be fascinating to hear of other examples.

    Comment by Cherine Munkholt | June 9, 2011 | Reply

  39. Hello. I was wondering if there were some knowledgeable people out there who might know which portion of the Chinese Classics was the first to be translated by western scholars? I’m guessing it was one of the Jesuit translations, possibly Intorcetta’s Latin translation of part of the Four Books, Sapientia Sinica (1662) or the full translation that followed, Confucius Sinarum Philosophus. Not sure, though. I’d be grateful for a nudge in the right direction.

    Comment by MIchael Farris | August 2, 2011 | Reply

  40. Hi Michael, Nestorian missionaries in Tang period might have produced the earliest translations of Chinese classic into Western language, but I don’t know much about that. This is back in the 7th or 8th century, and I doubt that any such translation had an impact on the West.

    You are probably right that a Jesuit translation of the classics is the first. I remember reading somewhere that a Portuguese Jesuit in Macau may have been the first to translate a full Chinese text into Western language (I’m guessing Latin), unfortunately I don’t recall his name or the text. (I believe I got the info from one of the articles by José Antonio Cervera Jiménez, or from the translation of Shih-Lu by Fidel Villarroel, listed in the Wikipedia link below.)

    The first translation of a full Chinese text that had some noticeable impact on the West was actually by a Spanish Dominican priest in Philippines, by the name of Juan Cobo. Here is his Wikipedia page:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Cobo

    The text he translated into Spanish, I think in the last decade of the 16th century, was Mingxin baojian (明心寶鑑) “Precious Mirror to Illumine the Heart”, brought to Philippines by Chinese immigrants from Fujian. The book was compiled by Fan Liben at the beginning of the Ming dynasty, and seems to be affiliated with “morality books” (shan shu 善書) popular at the time, which conveyed the message that Heaven rewards good deeds by good fortune and punishes bad deeds with calamities, and therefore that one should keep a careful record of one’s deeds good or bad (plus points for good, minus points for bad, a calculative regimen that would have appealed to the merchant class). But one gets the impression that Mingxin baojian is more profound in the message it conveys, certainly it is more comprehensive, doling out bite-sized advice from Chinese classics and popular texts on all nearly all aspects of life, arranged in orderly fashion. It is generally Confucian in spirit, including a lot of selections drawn from the Analects, Mencius, Xunzi, and the Neo-Confucians, but also eclectic, drawing from Daoist and Buddhist texts. The text was probably popular in southern China, and transmitted via sea-route to Vietnam and Korea, where abridged versions of it were popular, and used as a textbook in village schools. In Korea a preface written by a very young Yi Yulgok survives, he was impressed by the book’s architectonics. The older Yulgok was more rigidly Neo-Confucian and does not include it in his recommended curriculum.

    A few years later, in Philippines, Juan Cobo and his Dominican colleagues were also impressed with the book, comparing it to the works of Roman Stoics like Seneca. It convinced them that China was much more civilized than Spain’s colonies at the time, and that its people could be converted to Christianity “not by force of arms but by force of reason”. There was an ill-advised plan being aired at the time for Spain to invade China with the help of a Portuguese contingent and Japanese mercenaries, and perhaps it was to forestall the planned invasion that Cobo gave his colleague Benavides a translation of Mingxin baojian to present to the king of Spain. Cobo then went on to compose a text in Chinese on the scientific achievements of the West, couched in Neo-Confucian terms with the aim of using reason to persuade the Chinese to become Christian.

    Cobo was an admirable character. Since he belonged to a mendicant order, he lived in a hovel near the Chinese community in Manila, and went begging for alms with Benavides. They treated sick patients on their own beds, while they slept on the floor. The Spanish and the Chinese were moved to build a hospital for them. Later, a letter arrived from Toyotomi Hideyoshi threatening to invade Philippines after running over Korea and China, and since Cobo was the only Spanish person literate in Chinese, he was sent as an envoy to Japan, was treated well there, but drowned of shipwreck on his way back.

    Also interesting is Cobo’s description of the educational level of the Chinese. In a letter to his Dominican brothers in Mexico, he writes that the Chinese he encountered are the poorest of the poor from the Chinese mainland who come to Philippines to make a living. And yet while the fishermen of his hometown in Spain can only talk about fish, he can converse with the Chinese about the heavens and all manner of things. (I like to think that this is a vindication of the Neo-Confucian emphasis on universal education, however watered down it was in practice.)

    I have Cobo’s translation of Mingxin baojian into Spanish, and my own into English, as well as full and abridged versions in Chinese that were used in Korea and Vietnam, but unfortunately I don’t have them with me now. If you want the original source materials and have problems obtaining them, please let me know.

    Comment by Boram Lee | August 3, 2011 | Reply

  41. It might be helpful to add that a lot of the selections from Confucian classics and Neo-Confucian works in Mingxin baojian was probably taken from Xiao xue or “Elementary Learning”, a Neo-Confucian text that Zhu Xi helped to compile. (It is also possible that Fan Liben got the idea of arranging selections into a coherent overarching plan progressing in orderly fashion from Xiao xue as well.)

    Comment by Boram Lee | August 3, 2011 | Reply

    • Hi Boram,

      Thank you for the introduction to Juan Cobo! If I can find the 明心寳鑑 then I’ll definitely need to look at the Spanish translation at the very least. I’m currently in Taiwan, so I should be able to find both somewhere. If I need any help, I’ll be sure to reach you.

      Comment by Michael Farris | August 18, 2011 | Reply

  42. What is a good text (or post) for first-time readers of “Lao Tzu” that clarifies his use of the term “dao”? Much appreciated!

    Comment by D. Anderson | August 15, 2011 | Reply

    • Hi D! I don’t know if any clarification that is interesting can avoid being controversial here. Aside from the most blasé thing to say, which is that “dao” means “path,” any further reading of its meaning in the Daodejing will require a serious attempt at justification. Here are a couple of Chad Hansen pieces online that can give first-time readers who are seriously interested, some indication of the interpretive issues and Hansen’s own take on them:

      http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/taoism/

      http://www0.hku.hk/philodep/ch/laoency.htm

      Comment by Manyul Im | August 16, 2011 | Reply

    • In the Encyclopedia of Daoism, Isabelle Robinet, in her entry on the Daodejing, wrote this:
      “The main contribution of the Daode jing to Taoism and Chinese thought lies in the new meaning given to the word dao. Usually and broadly understood as “way,” “method,” or “rule of life,” dao takes on for the first time in the Daode jing the meaning of Ultimate Truth, one and transcendent, invisible (yi), inaudible (xi), and imperceptible (wei; sec. 14), not usable and not namable (sec. 1). Since the Dao is beyond all relationship of differentiation and judgement, it cannot be “daoed,” or “said” (dao), or practiced as a way. One cannot make use of it, as it is “neither this nor that.” However, in spite of this apophatic or negative approach, the Dao, through its Virtue (*de), is said to be the source of all life, the “mother,” “pervading” (tong), “rich in promises” and the only certain reference point (sec. 25); in this sense, it is “both this and that.” All that can be said (dao) and has a name is transient and pertains to the world; only the Dao that has no name is permanent. “Naming” and language, however, are said to be the “mother” of all things.

      This dimension of the Dao was retained, with varying emphases, by all schools of Taoism. The Dao is the source of the world, the point to which everything flows, the “treasure of the world” (sec. 62), that by which Heaven and Earth can exist. It has an evanescent and mysterious hypostatized presence that one would like to grasp or see (sec. 14 and 21), and seems to allude to an inner experience resulting from meditation practices aiming at quiescence (see *qingjing), and from a multidimensional view of the world. This gives the Daode jing a poetic and lyrical tone, and endows its teaching with a character different from that of other texts of its time.”
      From : http://www.goldenelixir.com/publications/eot_daode_jing.html

      Comment by Scott "Bao Pu" Barnwell | August 16, 2011 | Reply

  43. Does anyone know where I might find statistics on the numbers of Asian and Asian-American philosophers in the profession? I seem to remember the APA Committee on the Status of Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies addressing this in a past issue. However, the APA website is under construction and doesn’t at present provide access to back issues. If anyone has that issue (if indeed it is as I remember) or has other ideas about where I might find this data (assuming it’s ever been gathered – a bit assumption!), please let me know.

    Comment by Amy Olberding | September 1, 2011 | Reply

  44. I am considering offering a seminar on Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming in the spring, though am not yet decided. If anyone is familiar with Daniel Gardiner’s translations, “The Four Books” and “Learning to Be a Sage,” could you tell me if there is any textual overlap of Zhu Xi’s writings in them or not? This is my most important question. Additionally, if anyone has read Boi’s book, “Neo-Confucianism in History,” could you tell me whether you think it’s a valuable text for a seminar or not? Thanks much!

    Comment by Doug Berger | October 12, 2011 | Reply

    • Hello Doug! I’ve used Gardner’s Four Books volume. I wouldn’t say there is any substantial “overlap” with Zhu Xi’s writings. Gardner provides his own interlinear comments, based on his understanding of Zhu Xi’s writings/commentary. Within Gardner’s commentary, he often makes explicit reference to Zhu Xi, sometimes quoting from Zhu’s commentary, in translation of course. I hope that helps.

      Comment by Manyul Im | October 12, 2011 | Reply

      • Thanks, Manyul! I thought that would probably be Gardiner’s format. I am wondering whether the same works or parts of the same works of Zhu Xi are treated in “Four Books” and “Learning to be a Sage,” that is, is there any repitition of Zhu Xi’s writings in the translations of these two Gardiner texts?

        Comment by Doug Berger | October 12, 2011 | Reply

      • Hi Doug. Learning to be a Sage is, after a lengthy intro by Gardner, a translation of portions of the Conversations of Master Zhu (zhuzi yulei) with some interspersed passages from other material attributed to Zhu Xi, where Gardner thinks they are relevant. So, the two Gardner volumes don’t have much overlap if at all. Gardner aims to present Zhu Xi’s philosophical views about self-cultivation generally and systematically — and without too much repetition. It gives a good overview, though it also is annotated well enough for anyone who wants to follow up on particular items.

        Others who actually specialize in Neoconfucianism could tell you more — Steve Angle or Justin Tiwald, for example.

        Comment by Manyul Im | October 13, 2011 | Reply

        • Great! Thanks for the help, Manyul!

          Comment by Doug Berger | October 13, 2011 | Reply

      • Hi Doug (and Manyul),

        I just saw this question. Manyul’s right on: there is no overlap, since insofar as Gardner draws explicitly on Zhu in the Four Books volume, he’s using Zhu’s commentaries on those texts, whereas the Learning to Be a Sage volume draws on the chapters on “Learning” from near the beginning of the Zhuzi Yulei.

        I have reviewed Bol’s Neo-Confucianism in History for the Journal of Chinese Studies here. I think highly of it, and believe it would be a useful complement to a more philosophical approach to Neo-Confucianism. For one thing, Bol endeavors to take the philosophical side of Neo-Confucianism seriously, though he leaves plenty of room for debate! (For example, P.J. Ivanhoe has written a quite critical review of Bol’s book in a recent issue of Dao, focusing on Bol’s use of “coherence” as a translation for li. I do not agree with these criticisms by PJ–I have just been writing some reactions to them, in fact, in the context of another project–but they are certainly worth taking seriously by anyone using Bol’s book.)

        Comment by Steve Angle | October 15, 2011 | Reply

  45. http://tinyurl.com/blghxvw

    Check this out: V. Putin receives China’s Confucius Peace Prize. See the comments below about how he get the prize for going to war in Chechnya and Georgia. Does this give more reasons to think Confucianism is whatever people in official positions want it to become, that it is foldable doctrine?

    THat is a contemporary question but it is also an ancient question because we know about Brooks and Brooks. They show that Confucianism changed because many peoples in positions of power–the shi class–changed it to suit their needs, with every generation writing another chapter and revising the others. So the Confucian Peace Prize committee they are the latest to make further changes to the root concept of Confucianism, even not to the text of Confucius. Thoughts?

    Vygeny

    Comment by Vygeny Dochak | November 16, 2011 | Reply

    • Hi–Thanks for posting this. This has been a curious saga; the “committee” has been embroiled in controversy for claiming (without permission, apparently) to speak on behalf of a government ministry. I would hesitate before concluding anything from this about what “people in official positions want.” It’s also hard to see this as explicitly connected to any kind of overt “Confucianism.” (It will be very interesting to see what the reactions from the Confucian on-line community are.) Still, you’re certainly right to suggest that this contributes further to the story of the manipulation of the symbol “Confucius” (cf. Confucius Institutes, etc.).

      Comment by Steve Angle | November 17, 2011 | Reply

  46. Hi, I am doing my phd research on philosophy and ethics of technology. And, I have recently tried to look at social media from a Confucian perspective. But, it is only recently that I really started to examine the relation between (or, in fact, the compatibility of) social media and the Confucian way of life. While I started with the hope that Confucian ethics/Confucian philosophy will have something positive to contribute to the existing philosophical discussion on the benefits and harms, when I proceed with my analysis, it becomes apparent that the Confucian way of life seems to be rather incompatible with the design (and, depends on how one theorises the relations between design and use, use) of social media.

    Here, the obvious question is: Is the Confucian way of life impractical and/or inadequate, if social media is here to stay? Intuitively, my answer is no; but, at the moment, I have difficulties to articulate it. Anyhow, it may due to a defected exposition of the Confucian way of life of mine that leads to this negative conclusion.

    I am not quite sure how and where to proceed from this conclusion, I will be thankful if someone can offer me some direction or advice. I have the relevant text posted on: http://wongpakhang.com/?p=420

    Comment by PH Wong | November 26, 2011 | Reply

  47. For those of you who might be interested, Brian Leiter’s Philosophical Gourmet Report ranking of Chinese Philosophy PhD programs is supposed to have been updated, but in fact does not seem to have been yet, as all the information is old and identical to last round’s list two or three years ago. I have checked with Brian and he will let me know when it has been updated. Might be “fun” to discuss the new list when it’s published. I will post something about it after it is available.

    Comment by Manyul Im | December 7, 2011 | Reply

  48. I’m looking for advice as to the best discussions/treatments of Zhuangzi’s “butterfly dream: articles and/or books, in English. Thank you.

    Patrick

    Comment by Patrick S. O'Donnell | December 26, 2011 | Reply

  49. What response in Confucianism, if any, exists for people who are morally well-endowed (or conversely, ill-endowed) despite their familial upbringing and not because of it?

    For instance, I had spendthrifts for parents, and that taught me to be much more frugal and to live simply. However, they were also very rationalizing, even when they weren’t the most rational, which I perhaps adopted from them.

    But even in the most radical cases, it appears that children of highly virtuous or vicious parents grow up to be morally average on average. From Ghandi’s kids to Keith Jesperson’s kids, such data reveals very little in favor of the idea that parents’ morality significantly alters their children’s morality in the direction of the parents’ morality.

    I couldn’t imagine that this criticism doesn’t exist somewhere in the Ruist history, but I’m at a loss of where to find that kind of a criticism from Ruist interlocutors.

    Comment by Joshua Harwood | January 7, 2012 | Reply

    • Hi Joshua, I’m not sure I understand the question. What thesis in Confucianism is your observation supposed to challenge?
      This might be helpful:
      http://uselesstree.typepad.com/useless_tree/2011/10/confucian-child-rearing.html
      But:
      http://warpweftandway.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/profile-of-erin-cline-and-her-new-book-project/

      Comment by Bill Haines | January 7, 2012 | Reply

      • My question arose upon rereading Wong Pak Hang’s post: http://warpweftandway.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/social-media-and-confucian-way-of-life-a-losing-battle/, which reads:

        “Confucians’ insistence on the priority of familial relationships and the importance of filiality and fraternity, however, has already hinted that a separation between the public and private ought to be maintained. In Confucianism, the familial relationships are a model for other non-familial relationships. Family (or, the familial sphere) is believed to be distinct from other spheres in that the roles and role responsibilities in familial relationships are driven by natural affections and trust, i.e. parent-children and sibling; therefore, it provides qualitatively different feedbacks to people in their learning to become a person. And, it is also where people learn to socialise through assuming and performing the roles and fulfilling the responsibilities, and, thereby, to eventually achieve proper conducts and attitudes towards the non-familial members in the society. Hence, family is essential in people’s (moral) development from the Confucian point of view.”

        I’d challenge the tenet that “family is essential in people’s moral development.”

        I think that’s an accurate interpretation of Confucian material, but if we consider instances wherein the child develops morally preferred behaviors, even though the family may be morally virtuous, or even conversely, where morally virtuous people raise morally inferior, or even criminal children, how are we to justify the claim that family is essential to moral development? It appears that moral development occurs independently from one’s performance of familial roles.

        Now, human interaction is essential so that we don’t all turn out how feral children do, but I would want to challenge the idea that familial interaction is what is essential for the plain reason that it disregards cultures that keep blood ties for strictly genetic purposes, but build bonds and moral scope collectively.

        Comment by Joshua Harwood | January 7, 2012 | Reply

  50. Hi, I’m a first time visitor to Warp,Weft, and Way. While my usual nom-de-plume is mrc109, my philosophical brothers and sisters know me as “Wu Lee” taken from the book “Dancing with the Wu Lee Masters”. I prefer the “patterns of organic energy” intpretation for which ever phonic intonation is symbolically implied to derive that meaning (if anybody can phonetically spell this out for me, I would appreciate knowing how to pronounce this in english).

    My real question is about a translation. I have two vase’es each is a mirror image of the other (they were probably created to be displayed as a pair)? Anyway, there are displayed images of four beautiful young women, three are seated around a low rectangular table, one is standing behind. There are three young children who appear to be boys, (all have shaved heads excepting the sides, which is long and tied out to the sides, short-tail like, or bundled and fixed with something). One appears to be learning or reading from an open text in his hands, while one of the young ladies holds her larger text book open in her hands. She appears to be looking at him with expectation in her eyes. Another “child” is reaching with outstretched arms, and is leaning towards another seated young lady, giving the impression that he wants to be picked up or possibly receive something from the person. Her hands (like all the other females) are “hidden” shrouded by the very colorful robes they wear. The third child, approaching the group from out of the direct line of sight of all the ladies, appears to be carring some sort of pottery. The table has several containers on it. Two could possibly contain food, the other rectangular object, showing stacked opening on the front, appears to possibly contain or store the lesson books. These are hand painted with most excellent use of color, fine detail and use of shading. Very natural and life-like. These are “fired” porcelan works, bearing the original makers “personal stamp”. I am curious about the calligraphy inscription. There are four vertical lines composed of 4,3,4,3 (katagana?) symbols.

    I asked a few friends who are from Japan if they recognized any of the symbols, they said the architecture used for the calligraphy was “too old” for any of them to be able to recognize any modern translation into Japanese.

    I do not know anybody else who might be familiar with old Chinese symbols. Both vase’s have the same inscription. I was thinking these characters might present a poem or story line to give an overall meaning or significance to the scene depicted.

    I could send a digital image of the scene and the inscription if there is any interest at your end for what it means, or is trying to teach us for today?

    Wu Lee

    Comment by Steve Cummins | January 9, 2012 | Reply

  51. Hi Hive Mind,

    Could someone please inform me about the bibliographic details of a book by someone with a name something like Heping Chu or Hoping Chu, about Early Chinese society, I believe? I can’t track it down with the limited information I currently have.

    Ryan

    Comment by Ryan Nichols | March 6, 2012 | Reply

  52. Nevermind. I found it.

    Comment by Ryan Nichols | March 26, 2012 | Reply

  53. I am wondering if the below approach has already been documented? I am drafting a paper on Taoist concepts/morals and the application of experiential learning in the corporate environment. This is not intended as a “One cut-One kill” militaristic/corporate diatribe. That has been done over and over and I believe its a negative approach. Rather it is a “Reach for your potential and don’t hurt others on the way; rather, help others do the same and thus benefit all of society ” approach designed to overcome prevailing modern misconceptions of the management process. I have a BA in EAS, am a mature individual, family man and have been a sucessful (in terms of producing students that are interested in bettering society) martial arts instructor since 1997. I have worked in both field and project management in the construction arena and presently serve as a Senior Manager in information technology – for the last 30 years. For the last five, I have been experimenting with experiential teaching aimed at growing interpersonal understanding, positively influencing the behavior of others and in doing so, helping people grow their communication and team building skills within the IT disciplines. This effort has resulted in an improved working climate, quicker, more dependable deliveries, reduced communication mistakes, better interpersonal understanding and increased passive learning across all teams (70 applications and teams). The problem I am attacking; often, IT management in general and at all levels has a tendency to be very strong in technology skills, but not in social and/or managerial skills. I see a wide need to share this information. I wonder if anyone has approached this topic from this point of view? Respectfully, Rob J

    Comment by robertlangland | May 21, 2012 | Reply

    • Hi Rob; not that I’ve heard. Usually it’s the Art of War interpretation of Daoism that gets promoted in management literature. I like your approach; you should write some things down and start sharing/publishing it. Sounds like you have the right experience to address the issues on the management side.

      Comment by Manyul Im | May 22, 2012 | Reply

      • Exactly! The Art of war; I love it, but its over quoted and in western interpretation always ends up defining a one-off win or lose situation. Life isn’t, shouldn’t and doesn’t need to be like that.

        From my experience, life is constant empathy for others and never ending agonizing self, re-appraisal. This is not a bad thing, its needed for personal growth.

        The horizontal thinking approach, the Confucian, or good for society based approach, is inherently optimistic and that is what Corporations really want. They want winning options – cost versus benefit – both soft and hard. That’s what I am aiming at – instilling an almost insatiable desire to be positive. The VP’s I work with want that (even if they don’t realize it), but they have to overcome the personal fear of taking a risk or losing something if they think they “already own it”. As soon as they accept the risks of “combat or innovation”, their options to grow are endless. The cross overs here from Confusinan thought and Taoist and Buddhit values are everywhere, but unseen.

        That is what I am aiming at, the joy of improvement for everyone’s sake. I have found if you train for combat of any type, plan and prepare the playing field and do all the right things for all the right reasons, the Corp will win and you will win as well. What more can a Corp want of an employee? I have always taught martial arts this way and it’s the same way I train and team build. It simply works.

        I have started writing the experential lessons that match up to the Corp needs and skill sets. I have about 50 points so far. I will keep at it.

        All comments warmly welcome. Thanks.

        Comment by robertlangland | May 22, 2012 | Reply

      • Robert, you might be interested in this discussion posted by friend of the blog, Sam Crane, on his blog: http://uselesstree.typepad.com/useless_tree/2012/05/daoism-is-not-a-strategy.html

        Comment by Manyul Im | May 24, 2012 | Reply

        • I see the argument. Treading lightly here as I am citing personal experience not historic text, I think you can have both harmony and strategy if motivation is for the better good of others/Tao first. In benefitting them first, you may as well. For instance, Philosophical Taoism vs. Alchemic Taoism; Philosophical as a search for harmony with nature and alchemic as the search for control over it. In the real world, strategy is always a mix of both. Striving for pure harmony or pure control are two different paths that can either slightly succeed or both fail miserably. Ultimately, attempting to use strategy to master change management is a failure. Surfing with it is another thing indeed.

          A sense of harmony builds the bottom of let’s say for now a pyramid or prism (building up your skill sets or knowledge base by repetition). Patience with the rate of change fills the center. And, interestingly, in the real world, balancing on the very top is the shu or initial strategy. As a new life event energy enters the prism its filtered by experience and knowledge, the rainbow outcomes are your choices. Prysmatic persistence is the act of choosing one, maybe suceeding or failing and then choosing another. This is strategy in a “combat” environment – not giving up. Choose one and go for the ride.

          It’s like paddling a racing canoe without a keel, on a large and wide lake. The craft is very fast, the pinnacle of human design, very maneuverable and light, simple and perfect in economic function and yet the very things that make it perfect make it possible that nature can deal it havoc. Currents, waves and winds push the bow and stern in unpredictable directions, seemingly trying to spin the boat on the axis, maybe even flipping it over. But, if you understand the craft and the forces against, or with it, you can, to a great degree influence your destination.

          The strategy is getting where you want to go and knowing how to do it with your skills and knowledge. The harmony is knowing what the craft can do and working with it and the environment like a team. You watching out for the craft and the environments safety and they in turn “agreeing” to ceed you some amount of control. This way you minimize negative energy while using both yours and natures positive energy to reach your goal.

          The truth, sometimes you end up exactly where you intend to go, sometime you get out and portage a bit… So in a way, it’s not really a pyramid/prisim process – it’s a never ending circle of change and adaptation until you reach your goal. Thats gotta be Tao.

          Comment by Robert L Johnson | May 27, 2012 | Reply

  54. Looking away from Daoism but still in early Chinese thought, you might possibly find ideas like yours in early Confucian texts. See for example the last section of Analects 6 (and 12.9 for Henry Ford), and Book I of the Mencius.

    Comment by Bill Haines | May 22, 2012 | Reply

    • Got it. I read and see your point. Pretty close to spot on with what i am thinking, seeing and doing. Thanks.

      Comment by robertlangland | May 22, 2012 | Reply

  55. First-time poster but long-time lurker. I enjoy the blog.

    I hope my question isn’t too far afield for input. It’s this:

    Does anyone know of any studies that have been done assessing how effective imperial Confucianism was in producing the benevolent government that seemed to be the aim of the whole enterprise?

    I ask because it’s so easy to be seduced into thinking that the examination system and the sway of the Confucian canon ipso facto led to that type of government, when the reality instead could have been the predictable insincerity, corruption, and careerism that Confucius sought to prevent.

    So again–have any studies undertaken to measure how successful the system was in upholding the Confucian ideals in political practice? Better still, have any undertaken that compare levels of political corruption and common welfare across the traditional cultures of the major civilizations?

    Obviously, the answer to these questions will vary depending on what periods of Chinese history are looked at, but I’m still hoping someone can suggest scholarship related to the topic.

    Thanks in advance for any responses~

    Comment by Clay Burell | May 27, 2012 | Reply

    • Hi Clay. I don’t know of anything, but then I wouldn’t! Sungmoon Kim of City U in HK might know. Do you have a view about the value of something like imperial Confucianism, e.g. in Singapore?

      Comment by Bill Haines | May 31, 2012 | Reply

      • Thanks for the tip, Bill. Will pursue. While I enjoy looking at Singapore’s allegedly “soft authoritarianism,” I haven’t really considered to what degree it may be Confucian in any way. I’m really just more interested in the degree to which Confucianism may have–to borrow Acemoglu’s and Robinson’s phrase in Why Nations Fail–tempered the “extractive” tendencies of the imperial elites. We know how far short of the mark Christian doctrines were in inculcating any sort of benevolence in medieval Christendom’s elites, for example, so the question of whether Confucianism led to different results is a long-standing mental itch I’m wanting to scratch. I think I need to hit the Cambridge History of China and skim for evidence.

        Thanks again~

        Comment by Clay Burell | May 31, 2012 | Reply


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