10 21 21 Confucius - Dr. Laura Hatch PDF

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Dr. Laura Hatch...

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10/21/21 Where do you identify his virtue ethics? ● Confucius’ way of thinking about key issues about human relationships into a way of viewing life. What stood out to you from reading the Intro to Confucius, from the Analects themselves anything that you noticed? Were there any in particular that you liked? ● It drops us into when we are reading, feel like we’re one of his students, there can be specific names and it places us inside the context of sitting with these people. ● Most of them are quite straightforward and easy to understand. ● It’s an interesting process of how the Analects selections teach, we might have expected them to more like reading moral philosophy as in a snippet from and they’re actually built into short stories, thought experiments, or descriptions of historical events—there’s a lot of context for these insights that he gives. ● This is a lifetime of learning that this is a process that is meant to be a change in the way that you view the world. What is the world view that Confucius seems to be advocating for in the Analects selections that we have? ● It’s important for us to remember that he didn’t write these down personally, they were collected by students and passed down, and thus there is a sense of a buffer between us and Confucius himself in these. ● The way that they’ve been written, it feels easy to picture as that he’s the one writing this. ● When we put in “ism” on anything, Daoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, we’re trying to say there is the worldview out there in the world, but it’s like we put it in a box through, and we do this with all kinds, it’s easy for us to want to ascribe to that box, or certain conventions that hold true because that’s how we categorize, make quick judgments, and how we relate and compare. ● Confucianism isn’t necessarily like Confucius didn’t set out to create a religion, it was more just this is the way that he saw the world and thus to call it “Confucianism” and to refer to it as a religion as a general category doesn’t really hold that to what Confucius understood these Analects to be doing. Confucianism isn’t a church that one joins. ● What he’s doing is being as a weather vane: there are these ideas and traditions that are blowing through the air and he’s as the weather vane that points in the direction that things are flowing, tries to show also as a perhaps a compass, mixed metaphors, like also tried to point us to where we should be blowing. ● Slide 3: He’s collecting, organizing, and trying to define what are cultural practices from several centuries prior to him and from his current moment that makes for the ideal society by focusing first on how to become an ideal human being. ● Slide 4: Confucius was a scholar of Ru—being a religious, ritual expert. Thus, scholars who were studying ritual, ceremonies, as the cultural record keepers of ancient practices of ceremony, and what it means to participate in religious rituals. ● He was a really good scholar at a good historian of this discipline of cultural studies.

● His access to the ancient texts, his understanding of them influence the way that he writes the Analects and the way he understands what the perfect society would look like. ● Confucianism is a general, broad term for behaviors that have shaped Chinese culture for the past 4,000 years. ● Slide 5: he’s wanting us to wary of, assuming that we can as save these, defining Confucianism, and assuming we understand what it is because it is a worldview, and that’s immediately very complicated and individual, everyone is going to approach it very differently. ● Slide 5: However, he does give a couple of things to try to point out what are some of the common themes are within Confucianism including the veneration of ancestors, and we see this throughout the Analects and an emphasis on education—that we have to understand the old texts, old rituals, and ceremonial practices that make us who we are. ● For him, that also extends to understanding artistic practices—the cultivation of a family and social life relationships that we are working to better these relationships that we’re inside of an order to create a good society, whether that’s at the broad level of a nation like a whole state or town, village, family, a partnership, or a friendship. ● Slide 5: A grounding of moral teachings, these ethical principles, ground us in the cosmic reality of order and the harmony of social relationships. ● Confucius was either way that’s the Latin name that was not applied to him until many centuries later, but he’s called Confucius now pretty commonly. ● He’s living in a time when there’s a lot of warfare. He’s watching his society be ripped apart by lived during Warring States Period. He’s worried that people are giving up on what has made society cohesive in the past that people are focusing more on themselves on the individual, rather than on the social good. ● He’s seeing that people are moving away from a religion that they’re manipulating religion in order to gain status politically, he sees a fracturing of his world and he’s curious to know what are we going to look to try to glue ourselves back together again. ● As Nadeau says, Confucian cultivation begins with the Self. Thus Confucius is looking around all of the uncertainty that’s broiling around him and to him, it makes sense that we can’t fix the society until we fix ourselves personally that it has to come from within, and if each of us is making strides towards understanding each other better and living in better relationships with each other and making the effort to try to better these relationships. If everyone does that, then our society will heal. ● Slide 6: However, “purposeful living” requires that the individual recognize that they are at the “center of relationships,” we can’t have a relationship without another person, and thus a lot of this is coming to recognize that we only exist or as we only understand humanity because there are other people. ● “Learning how to treat others” is all tied up in our social world.

Some of the elements that the intro pointed to, when he’s talking about ritual, or when you hear the word “ritual,” what do you think of? What are some modern-day rituals that we participate in? ● Rituals can have ceremonies that can be broadly attributed to a lot of different events and experiences. ● Church: religious experiences often carry rituals things that we repeatedly do. ● It can be religious and also be things that are just events that we do repeatedly that we have repeated practices that go with those events that give meaning to our lives or shaped the way that we understand the year and social gatherings—tying rituals to tradition. ● Rituals can also be one-time, something that we participate in just once. It can also be something that has repeated experience within it, a lot of different kinds of rituals. ● Ritual typically has the connotation, that it is something that is done repeatedly perhaps a person only experiences it once. ● For Confucius, he’s a scholar of rule, ceremony, and rituals, this is what he’s studying, reading, archiving, and sitting with all the time, and thus to him, in his day in this Warring States Period, when there’s so much social unrest, he feels like religious rituals, have lost their meaning to people that we’ve come to see them he believes as a waste of time, we should be utilizing resources to build the military and working on the other issues within, trying to as curb crime, run society in a way that’s not perhaps so focused on religion. ● Slide 9: To him, this is a serious issue because, for Confucius, he feels as a ritual has intrinsically, inherently inside of itself a transformative value because whether or not the ritual itself has personal meaning to you, ritual, just the experience of it teaches us how to be much more aware of how we act in relation to others. Birthday parties can have rituals. How do those rituals feature other people? ● It brings people together, it’s about as a host or as the guest of a party, there’s a certain social convention about fitting everyone, bringing conversation together, and gift-giving, exchange, and trying to show care and love for each other. ● He’s interested in how that kind of ritual, while it may not be religious, the ritual itself if we think about it, teaches us a lot about human relationships how if we were to go back and study for him as if we were all become Ru scholars, how might we see the world differently socially. ● Thus for him, a return to studying ritual means learning again to see the daily life patterns that shape how we interact with one another, learning how to care again about the people that we encounter whether they’re strangers or our closest friends and that when we think about what it means to perform the ritual, we are learning how to care about other people, what it means to stand in front of another person.

● Nadeau points out that for Confucius, the religious element of this doesn’t come through as strongly, he’s much more interested in what it means for us to not necessarily be heard by the divine, but what it means to be heard by one another. ● Thus if we can return to these proper patterns of living in a ritual of constantly coming in and out of contact with each other, as the fabric of relationships, we would learn that we don’t just have religious ceremonies where you go watch something or participate in something being performed, go home, and you’re done with rituals, but instead, he wants us to start seeing how our entire life is patterned on interactions that are repeated, teach us and teach others about what it means to live together. ● Slide 10: Nadeau points out that this is why, very frequently, we will see Confucius depicted artistically with his hands together in their traditional greeting of hospitality, welcoming a person into your life with kindness, generosity, trust, and trying to learn what it means to see the world through as the lens of “ceremonial living.” ● Slide 11: How do we redefine our sense of what ritual is to include things like saying hi to people that you meet on the street, asking if people need help, waiting patiently in line, not getting frustrated on the phone when someone can’t answer our question, and helping people with the labor they’re engaged in—these are all daily interactions that we have with people, but to Confucius, these are core elements of human relationships and that we learn about them by thinking about them through the lens of ceremonial living. ● It’s basically about being considerate, being aware that everyone is human and just trying to extend to them—kindness, consideration, recognizing, and acknowledging one another’s humanity. ● Trying to, it’s not that he wants us all to be necessarily participating in actual codified rituals, those are great, but what he wants us to really do is to start seeing our lives through the lens of the ceremony through these patterns of engaging with one another. ● Slide 12: There is a lot of optimism in Confucius’ perspective or as his world view of what could happen if everybody were to see themselves as a project and that they start working on themselves as they interact with other people, recognizing the difficulty that comes with this. ● Slide 12: He’s hoping that while we are not born with an intrinsic sense of what these rituals are specifically, that’s taught culturally, he says, what he is hoping though, is that we will come to realize that intrinsically, inherently the human being understands that we want to be acknowledged as human beings and that we want to extend to one another compassion, kindness, respect, patients, and reciprocity—is a keyword for Confucius, the idea that you would do to others what you would want to be done to yourself, seeing yourself in them which also extends and reminds us of the Bhagavad-Gita of the chapter, where it describes seeing the Self in everyone else, and that their pain is your pain, and your pain is their pain.

● There’s always room for improving and being a good person, and as we continue to learn, grow, mature, and how we approach relationships—we keep learning, what that reciprocity looks like to us, or how we understand it. ● Slide 13: One of the key terms ren, define as “Co-Humanity,” Nadeau said that usually in introductions to Confucius, the value or virtue of ren is typically translated as kindness or love, but he shows to him, it makes a lot more sense to think of it, not just as love, but really as “Co-Humanity,” he shows how the character for ren comes from the idea that what is human as something human is defined by its existing in relationship to others. ● Another famous Confucius scholar said, to be human means being co-human, and thus this idea that we want to belong to society, relationships, we understand ourselves in relationships. ● The idea that starting as the project of the Self that learning to feel for others as virtue will beget virtue, understanding will beget more understanding—to “beget.” ● Virtue begets more virtue ● Beget means to lead to, or to produce more of. ● Slide 14: Thus the idea that Confucius sees that virtue begets more virtue, that as you are compassionate, it helps you to understand co-humanity that as you try to learn how to yield to have patience and to recognize that you’re in a relationship that requires you to care about other people, it will that patients will teach you to care about propriety and ritual—the idea that whatever you’re doing in one arena will help you grow somewhere else too. ● Slide 15: He wants us the idea of reciprocity—about trying to recognize that human beings are at the core the same that we want to establish for, what we would hope for ourselves, we want to help give that to other people: “[t]o be able to take what is near to oneself and make it an analogy for the treatment of others, that is the way of ren.” When he says that we want “to take what is near to oneself and make it an analogy for the treatment of others,” what does that make you think of? ● The idea of making “it an analogy” from your experience to understanding what other people are going through. ● Putting yourself in their shoes—this is an active imagination of creation in your mind. ● He is talking about making “analogy” as a poetic act of trying to understand others by using your experiences which obviously always means it’s going to be flawed because we all see things so differently, but trying to identify as what could be the core fundamental shared characteristics. ● Slide 15: Imagining the experience of what other people go through as Confucius says “Ren is shu,” Nadeau pulls this character apart showing that essentially comes to me as “like=heartedness” that we are like=hearted. ● He’s wanting us to work on our interpersonal communication skills.

Slide 16: He famously talks about the “Five Lasting Relationships.” Looking at these listed relationships, what would you say makes them lasting? Why would these be lasting relationships? Why are so many of them about family? ● The lifelong bonds of being together, family members that are seemingly randomly put together, and you have to figure out how to work together or not. These are, the family is nuclear space of these bonds of trying to work out what human relationships are and how we move through them. ● Trust and love depend on one another. There is a strong sense of Filial Piety here and this gets to the point that there are implicit hierarchies that Confucius sees in these relationships. ● He doesn’t believe that all relationships are completely the same and everybody should extend the exact same kind of love and care to each other that wouldn’t make sense to him, instead, we recognize that we are constantly moving through relationships that are very different, and we have to approach them differently and recognize them as different, but it doesn’t change the fact that we treat each other as human beings. ● Nadeau points out, this also speaks the emphasis of Filial Piety that there are consequences from Confucius—his teachings that are coming from several thousand years ago. The question of what can be the consequences of where this goes. ● Slide 17: Nadeau talks about how this “hierarchical nature of Confucian relationships is troubling to the modern, democratic West and at its worst, can be oppressive.” ● Slide 17: Nadeau is primarily speaking to a Western audience approaching Confucianism for the first time, but he mentions that the emphasis on hierarchy has had immense social consequences trying to point out that there are consequences to these ideas, how they get picked up, and utilized over the centuries. ● Looking at the Analects themselves, and trying to understand them as literature, how Confucius or how his disciples are writing these in order to try to convey the worldview. ● Nadeau also talks about how there is an interesting component of Confucius’ teaching method, where he was willing to teach pretty much anybody, it didn’t matter if they were rich, poor, what their background in education was, he was pretty much willing to accept any student. He just wanted somebody who was willing to learn, sit with him, and think about how to rechange our perspective. ● This is a lifelong process, Confucius himself is also within the lifelong pursuit. ● Slide 19: Something that is famously put forward by Confucius is the idea of the ideal “gentleman.” ● The word “gentleman,” obviously, we would think about, especially in his day, someone who’s aristocratic has access to financial means in order to gain a certain kind of education, social experiences in order to be classified as a “gentleman.” ● However, to Confucius, that’s not at all what it’s about—it’s about character. The “gentleman” is the person who is changing his being.

● Slide 20: Confucius Self in a modern perspective is interesting from Nedeau’s book. He talks about man, Tu Weiming, who describes the Confucian Self as a “center of relationships.” The idea is that as we gain more experiences throughout our lives, we understand relationships differently. ● These are big ideals that are interesting to think about what it could mean to live this and to see ourselves inside of it as well. Given what we’ve talked about today, how does that perhaps shaped by the way you understand the reading experience of the Analects, the things Confucius talks about? Where do you see the word “co-humanity” or personally do you identify Confucius being interested in these relationships and learning how to see each other as co-humanity, co-shapers of relationships of wanting to relearn how to navigate the patterns of relationships? ● Interestingly, when we talk about at a broad level about co-humanity that word never shows up in this translation of the Analects. ● As he mentioned, they’re not explicitly virtue ethics are doing, ethics and philosophy as he’s not theorizing a virtue itself very frequently. ● As a misplaced desire, the idea that he doesn’t necessarily agree, but these are not contentious writings. He’s careful, at least the way that these students are depicting him, in the way that he gives critic. ● Recognizing that we don’t all have the same opinions, perspectives, but what it is at the core that we do share. ● If we understand one another, and we’re all caring for one another, he seems to be saying that as the choreography of the universe, the inherent order of the universe will manifest in these human relationships, as we naturally will come to understand what the choreography of relationships looks like. ● All the advice is given about how to interact with others, better oneself in a productive, kind way how they’re talking about how one should behave in another country. Why do you think learning how to behave as a stranger in another community would speak well to the idea of learning how to care for other people? Where do you identify his interest in co-humanity and caring for one another? ● In this class, “Speaking to Precarity,” many of the situations of uncertainty that we’re seeing throughout these texts are still situations that we are grappling with today and perhaps certain key elements have changed especially in the way that we dissimilate and access information, but we are still working through these questions. The pandemic has very much brought ...