8:02pm, 14th St at Union Square

Official last day of the academic year (makeup for the two Tuesday snow days). Since my "Sacred Mountains" class had plenty of extracurricular activities, we didn't need it. Farewell, AY 2016-17, a year in which I taught quite the range of courses in quite the range of formats: an upper level and an introductory religious studies seminar (Theorizing Religion and Not To Scale: On Sacred Mountains), a university lecture course (Who New? A History of The New School, with my friend J), a seminar-turned-independent study (Exploring Religious Ethics: Confucianism in Dialogue), an advising tutorial (Buddhism as a Liberal Art), a conference tutorial (Mountains and Sacred Landscapes) and the Dean's Honor Symposium. Whew!

Cause for shame

As the president's nixonian brazenness elicits collusion in more and more of his supporters and allies, I need hardly repost this from Confucius:

VIII.13 

The Master said, “Be sincerely trustworthy and love learning, and hold fast to the good Way until death. Do not enter a state that is endangered, and do not reside in a state that is disordered. If the Way is being realized in the world then show yourself; if it is not, then go into reclusion. In a state that has the Way, to be poor and of low status is a cause for shame; in a state without the way, to be wealthy and honored is equally a cause for shame.” (Slingerland 82)

Comey's no hero of mine, but in a government of people with no commitment to the Way or the rites of democracy, it is no shame to be fired. In Nixon's case there were junzi (gentlemen) who resigned rather than be party to shamelessness; where are the junzi of today?

Musical finale

The course on Confucian ethics wrapped up today with a return to the Analects. I produced a one-page digest of key passages, some of which we'd discussed at length, some of which are influential for later developments we read about, and some of which were new. Here are the three new ones we spent the most time discussing (but in reverse chronological order), and one other, the wonderful VI.20.

III.23

The Master was discussing music with the Grand Music Master of Lu. He said, “What can be known about music is this: when it first begins, it resounds with a confusing variety of notes, but as it unfolds, these notes are reconciled by means of harmony, brought into tension by means of counterpoint, and finally woven together into a seamless whole. It is in this way that music reaches its perfection.” (Slingerland, 27)

VI.20 

知之者不如好之者，好之者不如樂之者

The Master said, “One who knows it is not the equal of one who loves it, and one who loves it is not the equal of one who takes joy in it.” (59) 

VIII.8

The Master said, “Find inspiration in the Odes, take your place through ritual, and achieve perfection with music.” (80)

XIX.9

Zixia said, “The gentleman has three aspects: when you gaze upon him from afar, he appears grave and imposing; once you approach him, he appears mild and welcoming; and when you listen to his words, he appears strict and serious.” (223)

帰日

Yesterday's classes both ended in Japan! (So did today's stroll through the BBG where we saw the last sakura and the first tree peonies.)

In the sacred mountains class, Japan came as the end of a trifecta. We first watched the final half hour of Zhang Yang's documentary "Kang Rinpoche," witnessing the arrival at Mt. Kailas of a group of Tibetan villagers who'd started their 1200 km full body prostrating pilgrimage a year beforehand. Then we discussed Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s last sermon. And finally it was Dogen's "Mountains and Waters Sutra," a piece of which we'd encountered before. What all three had in common was movement. The Mangkang villagers show the effort of pilgrimage. Dr. King chronicles the progress he's seen, progress which has taken him to the"mountaintop" from which he can see the road that has brought them so far, and the Promised Land. And Zen Master Dogen tells us that mountains walk - and don't say they don't! To doubt the walking of the mountains means that one does not yet know one's own walking.

In the Confucian ethics class it was, by coincidence, the person most responsible for anyone beyond the Soto School of Zen's knowing about Dogen, Watsuji Tetsuro. I've spent a lot of time in Watsuji's company over the years, going back to my year at Tokyo University in 1992-93, but this was the first time I'd approached his Rinrigaku from the perspective of Confucianism. It makes more sense than the Buddhist- or Heidegger-focused readings common in the West would lead you to expect. The 倫 rin of Watsuji's ethics (倫理学 rinrigaku), template for his famous 間柄 aidagara, are Mencius' five relations! And his attention to everyday interactions has a Confucian feel to it, too. But then he was the son of a Confucian scholar, a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine! The Western and Buddhist legacies are there, too, of course, and Watsuji's (he would say distinctively Japanese) appreciation of cultural plurality. But it makes a nice denouement for our course on Confucianism's prospects beyond the Middle Kingdom.

The courses continue for another week. Teams of students will give reports on assorted sacred mounts, from Nanda Devi to Shasta (but not Fuji). And our Confucian book club will return to the Analects.

Perfect containers

Delayed a fortnight because of Snow Day and Spring Break, we've arrived finally at Xunzi, who's wonderful! To remind students that he was still working within the framework of Kongzi (Confucius), our discussion traversed two Odes, each referred to twice in the text, and ended with a more general reference to the importance of the Odes. Somehow it makes most sense to describe our trajectory in reverse. We ended here:

Music is joy, an unavoidable human disposition. So, people cannot be without music; if they feel joy, they must express it in sound and give it shape in movement. The way of human beings is that changes in the motions of their nature are completely contained in those sounds and movements. So, people cannot be without joy, and their joy cannot be without shape, but if it takes she and does not accord with the Way, then there will inevitably be chaos. (284)

This chaos the ancient Sage Kings forestalled by assembling the Odes, whose fully embodied performance perfectly expresses joy. For while it is a thing to be welcomed, joy can distract us from the Way. The Odes ritualize the expression, and even the experience of joy. In every case, ritual begins in that which must be released, reaches full development in giving it proper form, and finishes in providing it satisfaction. (276)

The Xunzi's discussion of joy comes after the chapter on ritual, whose focus is not joy but grief. Grief, too, is an "unavoidable human disposition." It too is to be welcomed and ritualized. Xunzi eloquently and quite movingly describes sacrificial funeral rites as the refined expression of remembrance and longing (284). They operate primarily (if not necessarily exclusively) for the benefit of the living, whose haphazard expressions of grief would otherwise leave all unsatisfied.

They are the utmost in loyalty, trustworthiness, love, and respect. They are the fullest manifestation of ritual, proper regulation, good form, and proper appearance. If one is not a sage, then one will not be able to understand them. The sage clearly understands them. The well-bred man and the gentleman are at ease in carrying them out. The officials take them as things to be preserved. The common people take them as their set customs. The gentleman regards them as the way to be a proper human being. The common people regard them as serving the ghosts… (284)

Much to discuss there! The second of the Odes we read was #209, which describes the arc of a sacrificial rite; the line Xunzi twice cites refers to the appropriateness of even the laughter and words during ceremonial feasting. Ritualized joy even as part of mourning! It's fascinating, and surprisingly persuasive, as ritual theory - and as psychology. But if it's the way to be a proper human more than it is part of a relationship with the dead, that doesn't mean it's only about currently living human beings. For Xunzi sees human beings living out the Way as providing the true pattern and indeed the refined expression of all the ten thousand things. The first Ode we read, #241, described Heaven's pleasure at an early King who cleared the dead wood out of forests, etc. This isn't just a metaphor for the work one must do on oneself, but an indication that nature is incomplete until cultivated by human beings. It's a shocking idea for Americans raised to think of nature as opposed to human use or at least independent of it.

But the human's place isn't above nature, as is arguably the case in the Genesis narratives. There's a deep kinship between human beings and the ten thousand things. You find it, for instance, in the dispositions whose perfected expression makes human culture. Like mourning!

Among all the living things between Heaven and earth, those that have blood and qi are sure to have awareness, and of those that have awareness, none does not love its own kind. Now if one of the great birds or beasts loses its group of companions, then after a month or a season has passed, it is sure to retrace its former path and go by its old home. When it does, it is sure to pace back and forth, cry out, stomp the ground, pause hesitatingly, and only then is it able to leave the place. Even among smaller creatures such as swallows and sparrows, they will still screech for a moment before being able to leave. (283)

It's all quite beautiful, I think, profound. Even as I'm still a little sorry to see Mencius left behind, I can see why Xunzi seems to speak more to us today. He's every bit as committed to ritual and the classics as the other Confucians, but, perhaps because he offers a theory of why they work, he allows one to imagine new containers beyond those of ancient China which might also do the precious work he describes.

"Xunzi," trans. Eric L. Hutton, in Philip J, Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden, eds., Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 2nd. ed. (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 2001)

Canon ball

The course on Confucian ethics for which Lang students didn't sign up is unfolding quite nicely! We intrepid few are reading a lot of Confucian material, but reading it in ways which are truer to the tradition than many treatments - we've been reading and thinking about readings of these texts, too, including our own. (It's a commentarial tradition, after all, and in our own vaguely vicarious way we're participating in that.) I'm working out the details as we go along, but here's what we've done so far.

We started with a mini-lecture on the Confucianism problem in religious studies. As Wilfred Cantwell Smith famously quipped in The Meaning and End of Religion half a century ago, "the question 'Is Confucianism a religion?' is one that the West has never been able to answer, and China never able to ask." Why would it matter? Can we ask better questions - about ethics, religion, traditions, and the place of rujia (儒家) in Chinese culture? And why are we asking? What's in it for non-Chinese inquirers in 2017?

Our first reading was the influential recent celebration of the continued relevance of Chinese philosophy, Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh's The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us about the Good Life. We concentrated on the discussions of Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi but explored the book's larger argument and stakes, and got our first crumbs of Confucius, too. What can a Chinese tradition teach American students today, and what does it take to open yourself to it? Since one of the students is a philosophy student we also tossed around the chestnut of "what is philosophy?" - good to get that out of our system.

Then it was into the Analects (論語)! But not just any Analects. Our main text has been The Four Texts: The Basic Teachings of the Later Confucian Tradition, which reproduces the structure of the Confucian canon established in the 12th century by Zhuxi, and we read not just Gardner's selections but the snibbets of Zhuxi's commentary he includes with it. We didn't focus on Zhu's take, just on the fact that nobody in classical China would ever have encountered Analects on its own, without interlinear commentary. The main focus of our discussion was the situated character of Confucius' remarks: what out of context look like general principles are always couched in particular terms in response to questions from very particular people. I also brought in the first poem from the Book of Odes (詩經), the cornerstone of the learning Confucius practiced and recommended to others.

For a second session on the Analects I had students read other modern repackagings of the Analects: Tsai Chih Chung's Confucius Speaks: Words to Live By, Herbert Fingarette's Confucius: The Secular as Sacred and Yu Dan's Confucius from the Heart. Together with The Path that gave us two American and two Chinese takes, and let us start asking questions about how each in their own setting appropriated Confucius. All imply that Analects can profitably be read as a stand-alone text, and resituated Confucius' claims in contemporary contexts.

It was all a little too easy for me, so I moved forward some critical readings for the next session, Richard Madsen's "Obstacles to the Globalization of Confucianism" from Confucianism: A Habit of the Heart and Eske Møllgaard's "Chinese Ethics?" from the Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics. Unlike our other readings, these were critical. Møllgaard thinks all Chinese ethical traditions authoritarian in a dangerously mystifying way, while Madsen suggests that various elements of Confucian tradition and recent history make it unappealing beyond the sinosphere. By contrast with these readings, our earlier interpretations were revealed to be perhaps culpably apolitical, as if public service and political advice weren't central to the tradition - including the Analects. We also read the short "Great Learning" (大學) which Zhu Xi placed first in his Four Classics, which makes it more understandable that one might think the tradition essentially about moral self-cultivation and only in an ancillary way about public service.

Time, then for Mencius (孟子), again in Gardner's selections with Zhu Xi's commentary. How was this different from Analects, we inquired? Mencius is defending a philosophy against specific others, asserts the goodness of human nature, and gives a much richer sense of the king's duties to his people. But as a reminder that this was still a tradition which studied the classics, I brought in another Ode. This one, #101, is cited in a much-cited passage (5A2) about how Shun exemplified filial piety by marrying without telling his father, as his father would not have permitted him to wed. It's an interesting and involved case, made only more complicated by the use of the Ode. (Image from Mencius Speaks: The Cure for Chaos, 69 - the only part of 5A2 Tsai Chih-Chung sees fit to include.)

And today we closed the circle. Well, we read excerpts from the last of Zhu Xi's Four Masters, what Gardner renders as "Maintaining Perfect Balance" (中庸), along with Gardner's account of Zhu Xi's crafting the new "core curriculum" of the Four Books - displacing the Five Classics. Zhu was insistent not only that scholars should start with the Four, but that they do so in a very specific order (Gardner xxv):

We didn't read them in that order, but that enabled us today to see the contrivance of Zhu's editing. Placing Analects in a Mencian frame given Neoconfucian resonance by his glosses on "Great Learning" and capping it all with suggestions in "Maintaining Perfect Balance" that the Sage has an almost divine capacity to unite Heaven and the Ten Thousand Things, Zhu presents a coherent tradition uniting statecraft, family, cosmos and ritual, basing it all in cultivation of the "inborn luminous virtue" ("Great Learning" 1, Gardner, 3) shared by all.

You might not arrive at these understandings of these texts - let alone see them as flowing seamlessly into each other - if you took them on their own... which was just my point. It's important to know Zhu's canon, since it was this which centered Chinese culture for the next six centuries. It's valuable to appreciate the iconoclastic nature of tearing Analects out of this context, without Zhu's commentary or the companions he chose for it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is a thing. One should know what one is doing.

Perhaps it all makes more sense to me than to the students. We have been swooping and looping around a lot in time, from our time to that of Confucius and Mencius, back from there to the time of the Odes and forward to the time of the Neoconfucians... who take us back to the Great Learning, etc. It'll either clinch things or break the camel's back when, next week, we read Xunzi - who chronologically comes after Mencius and long before Xhu. Xunzi was valued as an interpreter of Confucius in the Han, was marginalized by the Neoconfucians, but has returned to favor in the aftermath of the heyday of Zhu's canon. It's the perspective The Path ends up finding most congenial. What will we think?

Seeds of judgment

In the Confucian ethics class today, we arrived at Mencius. Western moral philosophers like the Mencius, as Confucius' ideas have here become more systematic, and, in argument against rival views, philosophical arguments are made. Mencius charms also because of his confidence that all human beings are innately good, with "sprouts" or "seeds" of goodness. And yet, as in the East Asian Religions class I sat in on before going to China, the students weren't having it. Mencius seems argumentative, self-certain and too systematic, especially compared to the more Zenlike, self-critical and open-ended practice of Confucius as reported in the Analects. We spent some time on this passage (4B28).

We decided that Confucius would have stopped at the tenth line, with humble self-scrutiny instead of judgment of others; he would most surely not have gone on to find himself so impressive that the disregard of others could be accounted for only by their brutishness! Of course, this is a limit case; Mencius isn't really claiming to be so good, is he? And yet the sense of being treated unfairly haunts Mencius, even as it's wrapped in a Stoic equanimity. Thus the superior man has perpetual anxiety, but he has no unexpected troubles, 4B28 continues (in Gardner, The Four Books, 80), as though the junzi is prepared for the worst and only for this reason isn't perpetually disappointed in others. Wasn't this supposed to be an optimistic view?

In fact, the Mencius describes not only that and how one's sprouts can be cultivated but that and how most people do nothing of the sort. This might be the source of a terrible sadness at wasted human potential, worked through to stop the junzi from giving up and giving in; who else but the junzi, armed with the insights and practices of Confucius, has a hope of solving this problem - if kings were wise enough to employ their services? But to the students it seems just judgmental. He doesn't seem to them sorry to find that with many of his fellow humans what is there to choose between him and a beast?

With Zengxi

In the Confucian ethics tutorial, we pivoted out of an initial focus on the Analects in a pretty fun way. We had three assigned readings, and a delightful interlude with a passage from Confucius.

The first was a denunciation of "Chinese ethics" by a philosopher who thinks its apparently pleasing openness to complexity and the spontaneous insight of the sage is really a recipe for authoritarianism, an empty center which philosophers and emperors vie to fill, neither brooking dissent. The most pressing concern of Chinese scholars today would be to formulate an ethics that, unlike the traditional ethics, is not inextricably bound to the notion of a transcendent (sacred) state power. 

Next was a sociologist's reflection on why Confucianism has not made inroads beyond East Asia, as Buddhism and Confucianism have. He pointed to its use as political ideology, from the KMT to Singapore to the CCP, and incompatibility with Western individualism. If Confucianism does indeed become globalized, its major carriers ... may indeed be Asian artists and storytellers rather than scholars and politicians, he concludes, along with humanistic Buddhist and Daoist associations which meld a Confucian social ethic with religious benevolence and ritual. This embedded Confucianism may have a better chance of spreading than a separated, purified version. (110)

These arguments shone a light on the interpretations and appropriations of the Analects we've been looking at these past weeks, Herbert Fingarette's Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, Yu Dan's Confucius from the Heart and Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh's The Path, all of which offer an appealingly pragmatic virtue ethics of everyday life disconnected from politics or even family structure. This may be a "Confucian ethics" without Chinese characteristic, but is it fair to Confucius? Confucius (as described in the Analects) was a good teacher but would really have liked a chance to influence rulers, preparing his followers to be good scholar officials should they be fortunate enough to have the opportunity. (He was chagrined at not finding a buyer for his wares, Analects 9.13.) Public service was key, even if the way to do that well was constant moral self-cultivation. Reading Analects as an ethics divorced and divorceable from politics is as anachronistic as reading Aristotle's Ethics without his Politics, as incomplete as supposing Analects a stand-alone text rather a guide to (and entirely dependent on) the Classics of Poetry, Rites, History and Music.

Our third reading was the Great Learning, the brief text from the Liji which Song Neoconfucian Zhu Xi used - with suitable commentary - to anchor the Four Books. It recasts the Analects (the second of the four books) as skilfully as John's "In the beginning was the Word" does Genesis. The commentary-amplified Great Learning assures us that everyone is endowed with "luminous inner virtue," and that public benefit ripples outward from its cultivation through study of the principle of things (li). Read in this frame, the Four Books seem focused on individual cultivation, and metaphysics rather than politics - but of course the Four Books were also the examination material and lingua franca of all public officials!

Going back to the Analects, which doesn't touch on human nature, inner luminous virtue or li, we found a passage which sets out the problematic relationship of moral self-cultivation and public service. Confucius asks four of his followers what they would do if someone employed them. One describes how he'd make a state prosperous in three years. Another has more modest ambitions to be an effective official. A third would assist in proper performance of ceremonies.

The Master then turned to Zengxi. "You, Zengxi! What would you do?" 

Zengzi stopped strumming his zither, and as the last notes faded away he set the instrument aside and rose to his feet. "I would choose to do something quite different from any of the other three." 

"What harm is there in that?" the Master said. "We are all just talking about our aspirations." 

Zenzgi then said, "In the third month of Spring, once the Spring garments have been completed, I should like to assemble a company of five or six young men and six or seven boys to go bathe in the Yi River and enjoy the breeze upon the Rain Dance Altar, and then return singing to the Master's house." 

The Master sighed deeply, saying, "I am with Zengxi!" (11.26)

The point here is not an Epicurean one about the joy of seasonal pleasures with friends at the expense of society at large, nor is it likely an expression of world-weary despondency at the end of a political career which never had a chance to flower. It seems to be something more like one of those "no A without B, no B without C, no C without D..." formulations. One's aspiration, it seems, mustn't be political influence, service or even ritual propriety. Though these are things the junzi embodies too, they will not be fully embodied if they are the aim!

The aim should be something like living fully, humanly, in time and society. Philip Ivanhoe argued that Confucianism is a "character consequentialism" - an endorsement of individual self-cultivation because it has the best consequences for society as a whole. Should the individual then think of their self-cultivation as public service? Confucius' appreciation of Zengzi suggests otherwise. Perhaps the point is that the Confucian way, once embarked on, provides reasons enough for its continuation - reasons not accessible from the outside, even untranslatable into the language of external values (what Alasdair Macintyre called "goods internal to a practice").

The Master said, “One who knows it [the Way] is not the equal of one who loves it, and one who loves it is not the equal of one who takes joy in it. (6.20)

Well and good, but can this help us answer questions about the authoritarian political consequences of Confucianism? Stay tuned!

Eske Möllgaard, "Chinese Ethics?" The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics, ed. William Schweiker (Blackwell, 2008); Richard Madsen, "Obstacles to the Globalization of Confucianism," in Confucianism, a Habit of the Heart: Bellah, Civil Religion, and East Asia, ed. Philip J. Ivanhoe and Sungmoon Kim (SUNY, 2016), 99-111, 110; Philip J. Ivanhoe, "Character Consequentialism: An Early Confucian Contribution to Contemporary Ethical Theory," Journal of Religious Ethics 19/1 (1991): 55-70; Confucius: Analects with Selections from Traditional Commentaries, trans. Slingerland (Hackett, 2003), 123, 59 

Ancient medicine

Like most important ancient texts, Confucius' Analects 论语 confronts readers today in an entirely unprecedented form: as a stand-alone and self-interpreting book (not too mention translated). In the West, it joins the ranks of other "world classics" or "scriptures of world religions" wrested from thickets of commentary to blink obscurely at casual readers who wouldn't have made it past the threshold in days gone by. Even in its own tradition it wasn't thought to be discreet, but part of overlapping canons of other valued texts. (You've heard me make similar claims about the Book of Job's only "becoming a book" in our time.) Until the Song Dynasty Neoconfucians, as Daniel Gardner reminds us, Analects wouldn't have been in a top-five list of classics. It was more of a classic reader's guide - an indispensable how-to-read guide, which could neither displace the real classics nor stand alone without them.

I've just finished reading a serious effort to rectify the situation, Edward Slingerland's annotated translation, which offers for each vignette background and excerpts from some of the hundreds of commentaries written over the centuries - including those of recent Western scholars. It expands the length of the text by about a factor of ten, but what a world it opens up, of scores of characters (historical, as well as Confucius' contemporaries and students) and parsings of characters by each other - even before you get to the later parsings. Read with care!

Indeed, Confucius and his disciples turn out already to be part of a commentarial tradition. It's well known that Confucius claimed not to be an innovator, just a man who loved learning - studying the classics; in other words he was a commentator, and hoped in his life to show how a virtuous and ritually correct commentator might make his times more like the virtuous classical past.

Daniel K. Gardner, intro to The Four Books (Indianapolis: Hackett 2007), xvff

Confucius: Analects with Selections from Traditional Commentaries, trans Edward Slingerland (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 106

Hide yourself

We started our reading of Confucius' Analects today, my first time teaching this hoary text. I asked the students to identify passages that struck them as representative or curious and, as expected, these took us quickly to the heart of the matter. XI.6 (middle way, and disciples' personalities), IV.15 (the one thread, empathy and dutifulness),  XIII.13 (rectification of names). I directed attention to V.12 (golden rule, beyond many), III.20 (importance of the Odes - I had us read the first, cited here) and XI.12 (Confucius' supposed agnosticism). More next week, including filial piety, etc. And the one below, VIII.13, a passage which has been stuck in my craw these last days and weeks. Among the most disheartening developments in our failing democracy is the number of people willing to work with and for a lawless fraud. Gorsuch?

Forgetting to be worried

First real meeting of my tiny comparative ethics class, focusing on Confucianism. I guess I could call it an Oxbridge-style tutorial: two students and a professor meeting in the professor's office. But I'm amused by what one of my friends call it: my "book club"!

Today's book was The Path, meant as an accessible overview of the material ahead and a way to pose more general questions about the why, the what and the how of "doing" Confucian ethics here and now. I think it worked!

Why?
The Path's answer is that an engagement with ancient Chinese ideas "will change your life" - not quite the same promise as an ethics class but close enough to allow for some interesting discussion. The Path has been derided by some as a self-help book, and defended as the antithesis, a non-self-help book, since it suggests we will live more fulfilled and useful lives if we stop trying to find our "real selves" and instead work on making ourselves more aware, more flexible, more responsive, more open to change, starting right where we are. Well and good, one of my students - a philosophy major - said, but why is that good? There's no account here of the good, let alone acknowledgment that there might be disagreements about it. The Path directs us to work on real everyday relationships rather than big theories. You'd have to know more about Chinese ethical traditions than The Path tells you to know that the answer to these questions comes through the study of history. Which takes us to...

What?
The Path is for American readers today, so its Chinese examples are few and far between, including quotations from the classic texts at issue. (In the course the book is based on students are expected to read a few of these texts.) But there is a free Kindle book with quotations from the Chinese sources being discussed. Here are some from The Analects.

We spent a long time on the fourth one here, 7.19. Is Confucius describing his strengths, his aspirations or his weaknesses? My students weren't impressed at forgetting to eat and to be worried. In any case, forgetfulness doesn't sound like a virtue, does it, not like a sign of self-awareness! Maybe he's being humble or ironic, I suggested, after arguing unsuccessfully for the value of "flow" experiences. (In fact we had a fascinating discussion about the value of awareness and sincerity in our acts, including rituals, which will surely continue in coming weeks.) Perhaps we need to know about the context, I suggested. Who was the Duke of She? Who was Zilu? What if - as many commentaries say - he was an unjust ruler trying to conscript Confucius in his service? What if it's really about people like Zilu? Confucius' teachings are usually not delivered into a vacuum but in specific interpersonal situations, engaging with particular people with particular characters. Maybe the reason Confucius (moving to the next line) "loves the past and is diligent in seeking it" is because it is from history that we learn to recognize and deal with such characters - including our own?

How?
Confucius didn't write the Analects, and wouldn't have recommended anyone read just them even if he had. So how can we, sitting in my office in Greenwich Village in 2017, get anything out of an engagement with the Analects? I've assigned students an edition which includes commentary from Zhuxi, a much later figure (if decisive for the Confucian canon which came to define Chinese culture), and am reading other commentaries myself. After a preliminary discussion of the Analects next week, we'll turn to commentaries and interpretations (including looking back at the selections in The Path)... but we'll also read some of the Classic of History, to get a better sense of how ethics was taught. One of the students mentioned Plutarch's Lives as an analog, so I might bring that in. Maybe also something like the Episcopal Church's lives of saints, including recent ones.

I'm no 君子 junzi or 儒 ru myself, of course, so this will be a more rhetorical exercise than even I appreciate. But it might get us thinking in interesting new ways about the questions of ethics: what is it? what is it for? how is it articulated? how is it learned and taught?

Against self-serving effrontery

Reading about Confucius in these times is sobering. Not just about the alas universal experience of living under unjust rulers - what does the 君子 gentleman-scholar do, since fleeing public responsibility (what Daoists encourage) is not an option? But it's sobering also thinking about what can make a chaotic disrupter seem appealing, a force of creativity rather than destruction. Above is an excerpt from David Hall and Roger Ames' 1987 Thinking Through Confucius (p23), a contrast - avowedly overdrawn - between western ethical culture and China's.

Confucian ethics seeking dialogue!

I've finished my syllabus for "Exploring Religious Ethics: Confucianism in Dialogue." I'm quite excited by the structure, which centers on the Four Books and Five Classics, considering while sampling the ethical formation offered by a canon which includes philosophy, history, rites, poetry and augury, while also constantly referencing contemporary applications and debates. (I even use the work of two people I met at Fudan!) Now let's just hope the students show up...

子

My Confucianism-focused religious ethics course may be saved! There are still only four students signed up, but I proposed to our Associate Dean that I might convert it into an independent study/reading course, and she seems amenable. So course planning for it, which had been

somewhat stalled, has kicked back into high gear. I've not even ordered course texts ... but that's also because we're going to make extensive use of the online Chinese Text Project, from whose extensive collection "Confucianism" the word cloud above hails. Now ... where to begin?!

Feel good school

My spring course "Exploring Religious Ethics" has very few students signed up for it. That might be because it's focusing on Confucianism this time, but the trend of the last few iterations (on hipper traditions Buddhism and Christianity) suggests "religious ethics" itself fails to draw student interest. On Thursday I asked the students in "Theorizing Religion" if "ethics" was an off-putting word in a Lang context, and several agreed - especially when compounded with "religious!" People don't like to be pushed on their values, one said. It's just assumed that everyone agrees, said another, and that just by being here one is a good person. A quick scan of our course catalog shows very few courses in the ethics area across the whole university.

This is curious. Our institutional "Mission" is full of value words.

The New School prepares students to understand, contribute to, and succeed in a rapidly changing society, thus making the world a better and more just place. We will ensure that our students develop both the skills a sound education provides and the competencies essential for success and leadership in the emerging creative economy. We will also lead in generating practical and theoretical knowledge that enables people to better understand our world and improve conditions for local and global communities.

That's a little vague, actually, rather like our claim to be "progressive," and our commitment to "social justice." I'm committed to all those things, but they seem to me, well, a little undertheorized. To put it another way, "better"  and "more just" and "improved" are not self-explanatory: each presupposes a theory of the good. People have very different ideas of what is good, as of what justice is and demands. Even where people share a vision of the good, there are differences of emphasis and priority, difficult decisions and complicated interrelations of individual, interpersonal and political scales. And negotiating differences among views of the good is as hard as it is important at each of those scales. Any ethics class will tell you that - or would, if we offered them.

Most other universities have something like "ethical reasoning" as one of their general education goals for all students. Not us, but then we have rethought the whole idea of general education goals, which we prefer to call "Shared Capacities." (I was part of the earliest discussions around this; it's come a long way since I left the conversation in 2014.) The working list is interesting:

Capacities of excellent undergraduate

education across the country

Critical Analysis 

Multi-modal Communication 

Quantitative Reasoning 

Research Literacy 

Scientific Method 

Additional capacities provided by a 

New School undergraduate education

Authorship 

Creative Making 

Cross-Disciplinary Thinking

Flexibility and Resiliency 

Working in Complex Systems

Interesting, but there's nothing like ethics here, even as the process claims to be "guided" by the work on "Essential Learning Outcomes" of the Association of American Colleges & Universities' LEAP project. That list of outcomes includes four kinds of thing:

Knowledge of Human Cultures and the Physical and Natural World 

Intellectual and Practical Skills

Personal and Social Responsibility

Integrative and Applied Learning 

The third, described as including civic knowledge and engagement - local and global, intercultural knowledge and competence, ethical reasoning and action, and foundations and skills for lifelong learning, is absent from our list. (When I was part of the discussions, "social justice" was on our list. Some thought that since it pervades all our work - making the world a better place!! - it didn't need to be articulated as a separate capacity. I wasn't convinced either of those things was true - or that "social justice" adequately covered LEAP's ideas of "personal responsibility." In any case it was culled by the Provost.)

I don't want to be drawn back into the Shared Capacities discussions (I was actually offered the opportunity to lead the committee, and declined as politely as I could) but I wonder how we became so ethically smug. It has something to do with the sense that we are different from other schools and aways have been. We rest on the laurels of the heroic University in Exile, and fanciful ideas that we have always been not just "progressive" but "leftist," "pacifist," even "radical." The very word "new" seems to assure good karma. Even if we had been those things (we haven't), that wouldn't settle the ethics question for students today.

Actually, the university Mission and Vision is introduced by a reference and commitment to the "core values" of our venerable past:

THE NEW SCHOOL'S FUTURE WILL BE SHAPED BY THE CORE VALUES THAT HAVE DEFINED OUR PAST: ACADEMIC FREEDOM, TOLERANCE, AND EXPERIMENTATION

These are not lefty, radical or even particular progressive values, of course. They're liberal values. I don't have a problem with that, and think that New School tradition is better understood as liberal, too. (Liberal values will need all the defence they can get in the next years.) But there's something missing here, too, and not just as a characterization of the values of the school. (Where's democracy, for instance?) Freedom, tolerance and experimentation are for and by individuals doing their own thing in splendid unchecked isolation. There's no sense of the importance (and the hard reflective work) of Personal and Social Responsibility, no ethics to explore.

Preserved cherries

Taiwanese cartoonist Tsai Chih Chung's popularization of the Analects
Confucius Speaks has arrived in the mail. I know and love Tsai's Zen Speaks, which is funnier, but this is fun too. Some bits are just a little obscure though...

Which has given me an idea for another thing we might do next semester. To name and move beyond the cherry-picking which characterizes most readings of the Analects, I'll ask each student to bring in five or six passages that "really speak to you" and an equal number that "make no sense to you at all." (I include an example from Confucius Speaks.) We'll focus on the latter, and return to them later, to see if we can then make sense of them.

trans. Brian Bruya (Anchor Doubleday, 1996), 137

Your parents (sic), they are well?

I've started to think more about next semester's iteration of Exploring Religious Ethics focusing on Confucianism. Confucianism should serve many of the meta- points rather nicely, notably the ostensible secularity (or at least detachability-from-religion) of "ethics" - claims made for Confucianism, too. Wider moral communities come into play - ancestors, the earth, Tian - and also the question I've been calling the relation of ethics and ritual: is one best seen as an instance of the other?

I'm a long way from deciding what to do in the class, and in what order, but (or perhaps therefore) I've been thinking also about how to to do it. I had coffee this afternoon with L, a colleague who teaches about "non-western approaches to international relations" and has written about Daoist and Confucian alternatives to "Westphalianism" in political thinking. L has had students do various dramatizations in her classes and I'd just had a fabulous interactive class on William James, focused on how Varieties of Religious Experience is about channeling the voices of others. (What will it have been like to hear James performing the many very long excerpts from the religious experiences of others in the lectures which became Varieties?? What will it have been like to be James channeling them? We practiced hearing, and then performing ourselves...) We compared notes. What might one do in a course centered on Confucianism? It needs to be interactive. I told L about how Michael Puett's Harvard course on Chinese philosoophy has apparently changed lives by getting students to hold doors open for strangers.

Here's what I'm thinking now. These days many courses (especially social justice courses) start with a class discussion and decision on "ground rules." ("One mike," "Use I-statements," "Oops/Ouch," etc.) We'll have "Confucian" ground rules, and let them gently structure the nature of our interactions. With L's help I've thought of two possibilities so far. One involves deferring to others: when you and another student want to speak, and I (the teacher) call on you, you give the word to the other student. We can give that move a name and/or mark its performance whenever it happens in some way (a nod, perhaps, or a fingersnap), making explicit the way in which we are creating a world of courtesy and respect together. We could do the same with other civilities.

The other thing I'm considering involves a version of the tradition in Confucian societies (so L tells me) of asking about an interlocutors' parents well-being first, before asking theirs. "Your parents, they are well? And you?" Family is too fraught, and our students' families too fractured, for that to work in unmodified form. But what if, taking a page from Jeff Stout's take on Ciceronian piety towards the "sources of our being," we asked students early on to identify some of the sources of their being, and then asked about those? If a student tells us her grandmother is important to her, we'll ask her each week how her grandmother is doing. If a student says it's a teacher, or older friend or relation, we'll ask about them. If students decide it's someone else we should be asking about, they could tell us and we'll adjust.

It'd be weird and then, I would hope, it wouldn't be. It might be wonderful. We'd get a sense of what it is to interact with people not as abstracted individuals but as members of lineages of nurturance and memory - and to be seen by others similarly. How might our discussions change with that altered sense of where each of us is "coming from"?

I came up with this idea, I think, because of the way in which inviting last Fall's "Theorizing Religion" students to consider the styles of religion-making they inherit made our final class one in which I felt the presence of more than the students. (I guess I didn't write about it here; perhaps it seemed too intimate, not for sharing beyond that group.) With the students were sources of their being, lost loved ones whose memories guided them, the worlds to which they returned each night or holiday. I'm thinking also of the Buddhist practices which start with thinking of one's "benefactors," those who have made it possible for us to be what we are. Not "Confucian"? Not a problem, I think...

Anyone have a strong sense that this would be excellent, or awful?

Processing the semester

The semester, and the academic year, are over! Last bits of work are straggling in, but my classes have met for the last time - "Performing the Problem of Suffering" on Wednesday, "Exploring Religious Ethics" and "Lived Religion in New York" on Thursday. All three ended with final reflections, an ungraded synthesis which I encourage students to do in any genre which matters to them, so I'm awash with reports and visualizations of learning and arrival. These range from the slightly ridiculous - like the hand-drawn booklet from which the image above hails - to the sublime, like this Rothkoish muslin for the ethics class.

The student first dyed the whole thing yellow, then the lower portion purple (twice), to represent the struggle of ethical awareness and action - the yellow is saintly, the purple (my camera didn't capture the depth of it) human weakness and evil. It was part of the plan that eye level should be grey. Serendipitous was that the limit of the purple took on the shape of misty mountains - there's even a haze of green. Profound was the way it represented both the difficulty of ethics (it appears mostly purple, the yellow unattainable) and the underlying goodness of human nature (it's all yellow)... To know that you need to know how it was made. That's fitting, too, for process-intentional seminar pedagogy. 

Next-to-last

Scenes from the penultimate day of classes! Each contains a story.

Second one first: this is how "Lived Religion in New York" worked out its response to the project on religion in Shanghai with which we began. The Shanghai team had found four categories helpful for telling the story of religion in a city presumed secular: landmarks, compounds, privacy, waterways. As we started the semester we expected something similar for New York. What we've come up with instead is an interestingly contrasting story. We start in once relatively homogeneous ethnic neighborhoods, whose ways and means spill over into the public (to the surprise and consternation of those who think New York paradigmatically secular), which everyone passes through as they journey in-between places... all of which provides a context, materials and acceptance of individual religious/spiritual choice. This literally came together in the last 5 minutes of class! I'm excited to see how it plays out in our sharing of final reflections on Thursday. The lead-up to our choice of four terms will have given them a lot of material to work with.

The former needs a little more explanation. Our final class text is Hsiao-Lan Hu's This-worldly Nibbana (a text you've heard about before). Hu provides an ingenious, and profound, reading of non-Self by way of dependent co-arising, cannily using Judith Butler's ideas of "performativity" and "sedimentation" to suggest that what we take to be our Selves are in fact the congealing of contingent cultural practices of body, language and values which constitute - and are constituted by - us. People find their way to identifying with a gender because they have been taught to perform, and continue to perform, culturally specific ways of being gendered. As an example, Hu mentions the different ways little boys and little girls are taught to move their bodies in space, the former encouraged to stretch their limbs about, the latter to keep them close, with all manner of implications for how they understand and comport themselves in the future. Becoming aware of this allows one to start resisting it, but unlearning the very way we inhabit our bodies is an uphill task.

I decided to illustrate Hu's point about culturally-mediated gender embodiment by reference to my penchant for crossing my legs. This is something I've become more aware of recently as a friend I ride the subway with has pointed out I do this when sitting, blocking the passage of other riders (even as I think I'm moving my leg in anticipation of their movements). It seemed a timely example as the way men take up space in the subway has been enough of a theme in the last year to have been memorialized in the New Yorker's annual "Eustace" cover, and the subway has also kept cropping up in our Ethics Diaries discussions as an arena for ethical questions: I'd promised my friend I'd try not to do it in the subway anymore. You can probably guess what happened. Despite my intent not to do it during the rest of class, it kept happening, like Dr. Strangelove's Nazi arm salute! But I suppose the point was made.

Today's class ended unusually, too - with a prayer. Indeed, with two. Our last two course readings, Hu and, just before it, Pope Francis' encyclical letter on the environment Laudato Si', both end with prayers (Hu's is from Sulak Sivaraksa), so I thought it offered a nice sort of closure to read both of them together, especially as the scope of these readings might make the effort to lead a good life seem too great for us.

A prayer for our earth

All-powerful God,


you are present in the whole universe


and in the smallest of your creatures.


You embrace with your tenderness all that exists.

Pour out upon us the power of your love,


that we may protect life and beauty.


Fill us with peace, that we may live


as brothers and sisters, harming no one.


O God of the poor,


help us to rescue the abandoned


and forgotten of this earth,


so precious in your eyes.


Bring healing to our lives,


that we may protect the world and not prey on it,

that we may sow beauty,


not pollution and destruction.


Touch the hearts


of those who look only for gain


at the expense of the poor and the earth.


Teach us to discover the worth of each thing,


to be filled with awe and contemplation,


to recognize that we are profoundly united


with every creature


as we journey towards your infinite light.


We thank you for being with us each day.

Encourage us, we pray, in our struggle

for justice, love and peace.

Let us pray for world peace, social justice and environmental balance, which begin with our own breathing.

I breathe in calmly and breathe out mindfully.

Once I have seeds of peace and happiness within me, I try to reduce my selfish desire and reconstitute my consciousness.

With less attachment to myself, I try to understand the structural violence in the world.

Linking my heart with my head, I perceive the world holistically, a sphere full of living beings who are all related to me.

I try to expand my understanding with love to help build a more nonviolent world.

I vow to live simply and offer myself to the oppressed.

By the grace of the Compassionate Ones and with the help of good friends, may I be a partner in lessening the suffering of the world so that it may be a proper habitat for all sentient beings to live in harmony during this millennium.

(Laudato Si’, 178-79; This-Worldly Nibbana, 178)

Yours in anarchy

This gentleman came up in "Exploring Religious Ethics" today, twice. J. M. Hinton didn't look like this when I knew him, of course. The photo's from 1955 and he was my philosophy tutor at Worcester College, Oxford three decades later.

He might be bemused to have cropped up in a course on religion, being non-religious himself, and delighted at his second cameo. The first came, surprisingly enough, in a discussion of Zen koans. A grievously literal-minded philosophy student wanted to know if koans were solved, and what that meant. I said that from my understanding they were designed not to be solved, or dissolved, but to nag, indigestible, until - until whatever was supposed to happen happened: not something I was in a position to know about. Koans aren't aspirin, but administered in an entirely individualized way by a master to different students, responding (as we learned from Thomas Kasulis) "not to the student's question but to the student's question."

She was unimpressed, so I said I thought the well-chosen koan (chosen by teacher, not student) had to work as language that refused to be sense or nonsense. A bit like - I said, going out on a limb and saying so - my experience as an undergraduate with the ontological proof for the existence of God: the claim that the existence of the idea of a being greater than which could not be conceived proved the reality of such - since to exist is greater than not to. J. M. Hinton had had me read the standard refutations (notably Kant's "existence is not a predicate") but I wasn't buying it. I thought the refutation missed the point. If logic rejects this insight, I said, so much the worse for logic! Mr. Hinton - who knew me to be no more a theist than he at the time - said he didn't agree with me, but that I should keep with it. Perhaps Hinton encouraged my passionate and confused response because he was an anarchist.

One of the anarchists he had me read (in another tutorial, Moral and Political Philosophy I think it was, though he was probably the only tutor to assign anarchism, and I may have been the only one he assigned it to at the time) came up later in today's class. It was time again for "Ethics Diaries," when one of the students leads the class in discussion of an ethical topic or situation of their choice for half an hour, as I sit back, take notes, and try not to take sides. Today's topic was stealing, which was introduced through an anecdote about a shoplifter and the famous "Heinz's dilemma" - may a man whose wife will otherwise die steal a cancer medication he cannot afford, and which the pharmacist, whom he approached, refuses to sell him at a discount?

The oddly paired topics led the discussion to move toward queries about fair prices for things, and before long students were talking about employers who steal from their employees; how smart businesses control for a certain amount of theft; kleptomania, greed and need; cellphone insurance fraud; intellectual property and patents; and whether someone who needed shoes should steal the cheapest shoes she could find or the ones likely to last her the longest. As in "Ethics Diaries" discussions past, the discussion was centrifugal. Usually I just let it spin out of control, but this time the spirit of Michael Hinton inspired me to write a few words on the board:

Proudhon: "Property is theft!"