Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
JAMES F. PETERMAN
2014002776
10987654321
To All of My Teachers
., . . .
The Master said, If there are several people walking on the road, surely
there will be my guiding exemplars among them. I would choose [from
among] them whoever is adept [at complying with the Way] and then
follow them. In addition, I would choose whoever is not adept [at complying with the Way] and use their [examples] to rectify my conduct.
Analects 7.22
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: A Prologue to an Unlikely Project
xv
1
69
95
121
167
185
8 Fingarette on Handshaking
219
251
271
Notes 275
Bibliography
307
Index 315
Preface
This book offers the first full-length comparative study of the ethics of
ancient Chinese ethicist Confucius and the moral aspects of the later
therapeutic approach to philosophy of twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The title, Whose Tradition? Which Dao?: Confucius and
Wittgenstein on Moral Learning and Reflection, which alludes to Alasdair
MacIntyres book, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1989), takes seriously
a key claim of MacIntyres: Any sustainable version of moral inquiry must
not be committed to basic claims and principles that make that inquiry
impossible. To offer an example from MacIntyres playbook: If liberalism
claims that all moral traditions make arbitrary assumptions about moral
truth and it turns out that liberalism is itself a moral tradition, then liberalism makes claims that undermine its very possibility. I will refer to
this requirement as the requirement that moral traditions and their related
versions of moral inquiry may not be self-undermining. This principle of
evaluation of traditions, or what MacIntyre calls versions of moral inquiry,
can be traced back to the Socratic requirement that ethical judgments be
accounted for in a way that is coherent with the rest of the persons considered judgments. This book seeks to defend an interpretation of Confuciuss
project, depicted in the centrally important early Confucian text, Analects,
as operating in what Wittgenstein scholar Cora Diamond, taking a phrase
from Wittgenstein, refers to as the realistic spirit. The realistic spirit, as
distinct from the philosophical realist, seeks, as she puts it, to clarify our
life with concepts, including ethical life, in all its complexity, suspicious
of the simplification and nonsense bound up with traditional metaphysics.
Although the Socratic requirement that versions of moral inquiry not
be self-undermining is a basic principle for evaluation of competing versions
of moral inquiry, MacIntyres use of it to challenge the Confucian moral
tradition is unsuccessful. Although I explicitly take up MacIntyres challenge
to Confucianism in Chapter 7, the whole project of the book can be seen
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xii
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ment and critique can benefit from Confucian inquiry, just as Confucian
practice of moral inquiry can benefit from Wittgensteinian philosophical
investigations. They are, in fact, members of a family. From Confucius, we
know that family relations can be mutually supportive, and from Confucius
and Wittgenstein both, we know that family membership does not require
reduction of all to a single form. The use of Wittgenstein to articulate and
defend early Confucian versions of moral inquiry leaves us with the question
of how we can advance an early Confucian mode of inquiry today without
losing its distinctive character. In the Afterword, I take up this question and
offer a view of moral inquiry that appeals both to the Confucian tradition
for insights and to the Wittgensteinian quest for perspicuous presentations
of otherwise philosophically confusing aspects of our human form of life.1
Acknowledgments
Even though the actual writing of this book started in 2008, the idea for
the project first emerged in 1998 during a National Endowment for the
Humanities Institute, Chinese Philosophical and Religious Texts in Context, directed under the able leadership of Professor Henry Rosemont, who
was assisted by Professor Roger Ames. Never having had the opportunity to
study Eastern philosophies in a formal academic context and believing that
it would be good if I could, on occasion, add some Chinese philosophical
texts to my lower-level courses, I set out for Hawaii to attend this institute.
Before doing so, I began for the first time to read Confuciuss Analects and
was horrified at its approach to ethics and politics. I doubted my ability
to teach a text that is so dramatically disorganized and so fundamentally
committed to magical powers of ritual. By that time, however, I had already
signed up, and five weeks in Hawaii seemed attractive.
What happened at the institute was surprising, to say the least.
Although I started out with my typical skeptical method toward all things
philosophical, I found myself drawn into what felt like a different mode of
academic interaction. Later I realized that the culture of this institute reflected the key commitments of the Confucian texts under discussion. Central
to the interpretations offered of the Analects, especially Roger Amess, were
a focus on the practice of ritual and its creative and constructive character.
The relation between learning rituals and the ideals they embodied struck
me as importantly similar to Wittgensteins later approach to the relation
between ideals and language-games. I recall asking Roger Ames if anyone
had written on this relationship, and he said, No. I thought to myself,
Here is a project. On further reflection, it struck me that the Confucian
tradition offers us a glimpse of what it would mean to live in a tradition
committed to clarifying, rather than calling into question from the ground
up, its practices, so as to help those in that tradition to live in agreement
with their fundamental modes of living, an ideal central to Wittgensteins
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Acknowledgments
later philosophy. This was, I thought, a reflective tradition that Wittgenstein could warm up to. I returned to Tennessee jokingly claiming to have
converted to Confucianism, claiming to be the last living Confucian in
Tennessee. For his insights, advice, and ongoing encouragement over the
years, I am indebted to Roger Ames.
The academic year following this institute, I taught my first course
on Chinese Philosophy. I felt myself a fraud. Without reading the texts
in Chinese, given the variety of translations, I wondered, how could I
represent to students their real meanings? The next year I took advantage
of a follow-up East-West Center academic tour of sacred sites in China. I
took lots of photos of different types of temples, but the best thing that
happened on that tour happened on an overnight train trip: tour leader
Ned Davis, University of Hawaii professor of history, persuaded me that
it should be possible for me to learn Chinese and use it in my academic
work. I took the bait and the next summer traveled to Beijing Language
University to take part in its immersion course in Mandarin. Later that
fall, I sat in on University of CaliforniaBerkeley Professor Phil Riegels
Introduction to Classical Chinese. I spent the next semester poring over dictionaries, grammar books, and translations of the Analects, trying to develop
my own translation. Every summer since then, except 2008, I have spent
the summer in China studying Mandarin or classical Chinese and trying
to get more familiar with all things Chinese. In one form or another, this
travel was supported by Dean of the College John Gatta and the Research
Grants Committee at my home institution, Sewanee: The University of the
South. For the many opportunities given to me by Sewanee, including the
opportunity to teach at the most culturally Chinese academic institution in
the United States, I will be forever grateful.
In 2002, under the auspices of ASIANetwork, four of my students and
I traveled to Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, China, and interviewed
some forty students on their attitudes to parental authority. The results of this
study were published as The Fate of Confucianism in Contemporary China
in Asian Studies in America: Newsletter of the Asian Studies Development Program, Fall 2003. I wish to thank my Zhongshan University friends Wang
Kun, Ai Xiaoming, and Ke Qianting for their assistance and conviviality. I
am especially indebted to Ke Qianting, who spent hours with me in conversation later, when she was on a teaching-research fellowship at Sewanee.
Much of my early thinking about how to understand Confucianism under
a Wittgensteinian lens came out of this research and these conversations.
I am especially indebted to my mainland Chinese Mandarin teachers and friends: in Beijing, Xue Er; in Kunming, Xu Peng, Xu Feng, and
Acknowledgments
xvii
Zhu Lan; and to Keats School teacher and comrade in the dao, Pan Siyi,
without whom my grasp of classical Chinese language and culture would
be all the poorer.
In 2008, under the auspices of the Fulbright Foundation, I spent ten
months in Taipei, Taiwan, as a senior fellow, living and working at Academia
Sinica and traveling from one coffee spot to the next, writing the first draft
of this book. My application for this fellowship was improved by expert
advice from my friends and colleagues, Professor Charles Brockett, Professor
Richard OConnor, and Dean Rita Kipp, and from Fulbright Foundation
Senior Officer David Adams.
Although my work in Taipei was supported and sustained by the
professional services offered by Fulbright Taiwan, some of the most important conversations and opportunities were made possible by good friend
Professor Kirill Thompson of Taiwan National University, who gave of his
precious time to give me feedback on my work and to make sure I was in
contact with other Taiwan National University philosophers. To him, I am
profoundly indebted. In addition to introducing me to colleagues, Kirill
also arranged for me to spend four hours a week with my teacher, Yang
Youwei Laoshi, in what has turned out to be his last chance to teach a long
list of Western scholars: Roger Ames, Carine DeFoort, Christian Joachim,
John Makeham, Randy Peerenbohm, Lisa Raphaels, and Kirill Thompson,
to name a few. I feel humbled to have been the last student among such a
distinguished group. Having published nothing of his own, Yang Laoshis
lifetime study of the Chinese classics lives on in the work of these scholars.
Yang Laoshi grew up in Beijing in a Confucian family, studying the
classics with the help of his uncle and mother, herself a committed Confucian from a family of scholar officials. Yang Laoshis linguistic insights
were, to say the least, profound. He was nothing if not opinionated, fully
confident of the correctness of every one of his judgments, even when they
changed from day to day, able to riff from the meaning of a character, to
the bankruptcy of contemporary culture, to the problem with American
foreign policy, as if he were discussing one topic. Despite his stubbornness
and the ferocity of his judgments and arguments, he was willing to listen
when I was prepared, in my poor Chinese, to press my own points. From
time to time, I had the feeling that I was in the presence of a Chinese
Wittgenstein, someone who represented an earlier culture, out of tune with
his own times, uncompromising in his intellectual and moral commitments,
but also in his commitment to me as his student.
I traveled two times a week to Yang Laoshis apartment, where we
crawled line by line through the Analects. On occasion, I was able to share
xviii
Acknowledgments
with him some of my work on this text. Although his academic work in the
United States in the 1960s had been in psychology, he was deeply interested
in philosophy, but he was not familiar with the details of Wittgensteins
writings. He was especially attracted to my characterization and use of
Wittgensteins view of nonsense. Later in our times together, he seemed to
relish characterizing certain problematic translations of Analects passages as
pihua, nonsense, in this Wittgensteinian sense. I would like to think that
on a few occasions such as these, I managed to become a partner with
him in inquiry.
In the summer of 2010, I spent a week with Yang Laoshi when we
looked over the translations of passages I use in this book. I am grateful
to him for his help and for the time we spent together. Two days before I
wrote the initial draft of the Acknowledgments for this book, Yang Laoshi
passed away. The books dedication, To all my teachers, although not
solely for him, finds in my own (xin, heart and mind) a large place for
him and for the kinds of thinking and writing my time with him in Taipei
opened up for me.
In addition to my weekly visits to Yang Laoshi while in Taipei, I was
invited by my friend Professor Sato Masayuki of Taiwan National Universitys Philosophy Department to participate in their departments lively
conference series, to give a lecture to the Philosophy Department during
that fellowship year, to give another lecture the next fall, and to deliver
three lectures on parts of this book in the spring of 2009. On these occasions, I benefited from conversations with Professor Masayuki and his colleague, Professor Christian Wenzel. This book would be poorer without
those opportunities and without their efforts to welcome me and to discuss
issues that arose in the early version of my manuscript.
I am indebted to my friend Professor P. J. Ivanhoe of City University
of Hong Kong, who read the penultimate version of this manuscript and
provided a range of helpful suggestions about how to connect my arguments with the aspects of the Confucian tradition that I have not had an
opportunity to investigate and with recent discussions of which I was not
fully aware. My thanks also go to my friend and colleague at Sewanee,
Professor Andrew Moser, who listened and gave feedback during hours of
my thinking out loud about the issues I take up here, and to my copy editor, Kathy Hamman, whose perceptive linguistic sense made the language
of the text clearer than I was able to make it by myself.
I have to express my deepest feelings of gratitude to my wife, Merissa
Tobler, who resolutely, without a hint of complaint, let me reserve ten years
of much of my spare time and attention to this project.
Acknowledgments
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Acknowledgments
Introduction
A Prologue to an Unlikely Project
Introduction
In the course of talking to philosophers about this book, though many
expressed some interest in the project, just as many expressed reservations.
What possibly could be the connection between Confucius and Wittgenstein? Others seemed to think that even if there were a substantial, important
connection, it would be very difficult to establish.
1
Introduction
spirit, it can be argued, they both are subject to the charge of arbitrariness, and both require some theoretical grounding if they are to be carried
forward. I will argue that by combining forces, the two forms of spirit can
develop even better strategies for addressing these criticisms than they are
able to muster alone. In the course of this comparative study, I discovered
that the unusual juxtaposition of Wittgensteins and Confuciuss philosophies, including their ungrounded spirits, produces not only a different,
stronger spirit than either one embodies alone, but in so doing, addresses
outstanding issues, such as the meaning and truth of the sentences of the
Analects, as well as its contemporary relevance.
The way I develop these arguments depends on which versions of
Wittgenstein and Confucius I choose to discuss. My version of Wittgenstein shares some similarities with the so-called New Wittgenstein,4 who
is suspicious of metaphysical/epistemological theories designed to provide
an explanation of justification for ordinary linguistic practices. Wittgenstein
holds that once our ordinary criteria for something being true or real are
applied to a situation to justify the correctness of a sentence, there are no
further epistemological, metaphysical, foundational questions to raise about
the correctness of the language-game in which the utterance takes place. As
Wittgenstein says of any particular language, This is the language-game that
is being played.5 The fate of Confuciuss self-cultivationist approach to ethics and related eschewal of metaphysics, I argue, is wedded to the success of
Wittgensteins very similar project. However, Wittgensteins later avoidance
of sustained discussion of ethics benefits from the sort of supplementation
offered by Confuciuss Analects.
Despite these affinities between my Wittgenstein and the New Wittgenstein, following recent work of Meredith Williams and Nigel Pleasants,
I argue that Wittgenstein would not agree with the New Wittgensteinian
tendency to be suspicious of traditional moral authority. I take these issues
up in some detail in Chapter 2.
In this chapter, I will provide an overview of Confuciuss and Wittgensteins teachings. The overviews goal is to persuade readers that the two
philosophers share a roughly similar account of the norms embedded in
human life and language, despite the large differences between their projects.
I will call these accounts or commitments their shared basic insight that
our primary relationship to norms, one necessary for understanding them, is
through learning. This approach constitutes a key stumbling block for interpretation and evaluation of both thinkers projects. As a result of this insight,
both projects address the problems they facefor Confucius, how to restore
a life lived in conformity with dao, meaning the set of norms governing
Introduction
Bedrock Practices
An important caveat to any comparative presentation of Wittgensteins later
philosophy alongside Confucian teaching in the Analects is that whereas
Wittgenstein offers a view of language that would play a role in investigating
and resolving the problems of philosophy, Confuciuss teaching is designed
to clarify dao with the goal of fostering self-cultivation and culture-wide
recovery of dao, which had been left in disrepair with the gradual dissolution of the political and cultural power of the Zhou Dynasty. Despite these
differences, Wittgensteins project centers on the key issue of understanding the role of norms within human life with an emphasis on language.
Confuciuss project is formed out of a sense of the basic character of dao,
the norms governing human life and, primarily, the care of human relationships. It is true that some later passages in the Analects take up the political
project of rectifying names, but Confucius does not develop an interest in
language and rectification of names in general, beyond his limited interest
in functional terms, like father and ruler. These terms imply norms,
which, when strictly applied to people, require applying them to people
who must live up to those norms.6
One additional noteworthy similarity between the texts is their preoccupation with teaching and learning. Confucius describes the need for
a devotion to learning (haoxue), especially of ritual (li), as the
principal first step in self-cultivation and also offers a phenomenology of
what it is like to move along the path from novice to master of dao.
Moreover, one of Confuciuss disciples, Master You (Youzi), supplements
Confuciuss focus on learning ritual with an account of how performing
relatively concrete practices, like keeping ones word (xin), provides a
basic practice that prepares one for the more complex range of practices
that make up righteousness (yi). Youzis focus includes an emphasis on
being filial or obedience to parents, which he generalizes to obedience to
those in authority. Both Confucius and Youzi emphasize that basic, bedrock
practices are the first steps and constitutive features of understanding and
practicing norms.7
Introduction
This problem seems all the more pressing given that when Confucius
discusses daos constitutive ideals, such as goodness or humanity ( ren),
filiality ( xiao), and trust ( xin), he often characterizes them in various
ways.23 And in some cases, his characterizations seem designed specifically
for the person with whom he is talking. Lacking any comprehensive definition and any account of the reality of dao, one might argue that it is hard
to see what basis Confucius might have for treating dao as real. Without
such an account, we might think we need to accuse him of ethical provincialism if not wholesale bias.24
There are several aspects to an adequate account of Confuciuss socalled realism. If he is a realist, then he is a realist without a theoretical
elaboration of his realism. Confucian realism would have to be understood
as one would understand it from the vantage point of his fundamental
project of self-cultivation in those practices, attitudes, and reflective understandings and forms of sensitivity and responsiveness that constitute dao
(the norms of living well).
The burden of my argument will be to show what Confuciuss form
of realism involves and why philosophers might want to take it seriously as
an alternative to theoretical, metaphysical accounts of the reality of norms.
To that end, I examine Wittgensteins approach to realism in Chapter 2.
Unlike Confuciuss realism, Wittgenstein intentionally seeks to place limits
on the meaningfulness of metaphysical language as a way of protecting our
complicated forms of life and those ways of thinking and speaking central to
it. Before that argument is made, it is important to understand Confuciuss
and Wittgensteins shared basic insight, which is central to the form of realism that Confucius adopts. I borrow a term from Wittgenstein scholar and
philosopher Cora Diamond; she uses realistic spirit to capture Wittgensteins realism. Confucius also embraces the realism of the realistic spirit.
At this point, I wish to capture one aspect of that spirit, specifically
the way in which Confucius appears to have no interest in questions of
metaphysics and definitions of key normative concepts; nevertheless, he
thinks of dao and its constitutive norms as real. In the account I offer, the
reality of dao together with its constitutive ideals are embodied in Confucian
practices of learning; these practices constitute and illustrate real instances of
dao and its ideals. The primary way to understand those ideals is to learn the
ritual practices that embody them. If this is true, then all we need to know
about Confucian ideals comes from learning and acquiring them with the
assistance of someone who has mastered them. Confuciuss down-to-earth
instructions plus any extensions of the ideals taught by master practitioners,
Introduction
10
Introduction
11
Bedrock Learning
A key feature of bedrock learning is that a novice is required to follow
blindly the teaching of the master. What distinguishes bedrock learning
from other forms of learning is the fact that we do it without justification.
It is just what we do. As Wittgenstein says:
How am I able to obey a rule?If this is not a question about
causes, then it is about the justification for my acting this way
in complying with the rule.
Once I have exhausted the justifications I have reached
bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say,
This is simply what I do.31
My act of obeying a rule rests on bedrock practices, which, while
they supply me with a way to justify proceeding as I do, are not themselves
justified. They are what I do. But Wittgenstein is at pains to point out that
what I do is the by-product of learning from someone who is already a
master of the practice I am engaged in. So at this bedrock level, a person
could just as well say, This is what I learned. Or, This is what we accomplished practitioners do. Or, This is what a master of this practice does.32
The novice lacks a grasp of the conceptual terrain he is being initiated
into, and only later, after mastering a bedrock practice, can he come to
have the basic concepts of that terrain. Therefore, Wittgenstein distinguishes
between ostensive teaching and definition: the latter requires concepts
in the terrain of the definition, but the former does not. So, if I am to ask
what the meaning of the word tree is and understand possible answers, I
already need to have mastered the concept of plants, height, longevity, and
so on. In contrast, ostensive teaching simply involves pointing and naming,
as a basic form of learning required before a person has understood the
concepts of tree, plants, and so forth.
Meredith Williams discusses this feature of Wittgensteins view of
concepts in a way that is instructive. She argues that for Wittgenstein,
how a person learns a concept is constitutive of that concept. She quotes
Wittgenstein in support of her claim:
12
Introduction
13
14
Introduction
15
16
Introduction
17
the novice has not yet learned basic mathematics and does not yet have a
concept of number. A parent or teacher saying, This is four, while pointing to four objects, is part of the training. Under normal circumstances,
this type of instruction leads the pupil to an understanding of the concept
of number, including the number four. Until that level of mastery occurs,
the novice can be said to be counting, adding, and knowing what four and
other numbers mean only because of the context of the learning and his
relationship to the master of counting.
In contrast, the Analects Master-novice relationships occur primarily
between adults and young adults who have already, presumably, mastered
the basics of ordinary language, including the moral language of the rituals
and virtues. As helpful as this comparison might be between a child learning numbers and an adult learning how to practice moral goodness, it is
not exact. Moreover, if bedrock beliefs and practices are understood only
as the beliefs and practices taught to child-novices who are being initiated
for the first time into a conceptual terrain and related language-games, this
simplistic understanding does not represent the situation of Confuciuss
novices, who are mostly young adults and are already trained in the basic
language and concepts of living morally good lives.47
My response to this concern is multifaceted. There is nothing in the
Analects to suggest that Confucius would be hostile to the claim that moral
understanding starts at a young age and that the training he offers adults is
secondary to that. In fact, in Analects 19.12, Zixia makes this very argument:
.., , .
.. ., . .. .
.. . . .
. . .
Youzi said, The young disciples of Zixia serve as sprinklers,
sweepers, dealing with guests, their coming and going, and these
they are worthy to do. But these are merely minor subjects; as
for regulation of the basics, they have none. How can I deal
with them? Zixia heard this, saying, Alas, Youzis words are
excessive. As for the way of the well-cultivated man, what first is
transmitted? Afterward what should last be transmitted? We can
think of it as similar to groups of plants and trees. We classify
them according to their differences. The way of the gentleman,
how could it be so falsely distorted? As for one who grasps both
the beginning and the end, wont he alone be a wise man?
18
Although not Confuciuss argument, this passage shows an early appreciation of the need to begin in childhood with very basic practices. To this
passage, we might also add the famous passage in which Confucius offers
his spiritual autobiography, Analects 2.4, in which he says that he set his
mind on cultivation since he was fifteen years old. Presumably, his serious
level of commitment did not arise from nothing, but rather, from his own
appreciation at that early age of the benefits of learning he had gained
prior to this.48
Nonetheless, it is true that moral cultivation of children is not the
core focus of the Analects. I would venture to say that because his project
concerned moral cultivation of adults, it was not a topic Confucius felt a
strong need to discuss. It is also noteworthy that despite emphasizing the
importance of filiality, Youzi himself does not discuss filiality in children.
The demands of filiality that he and Confucius discuss are demands of
adult children toward parents. Children might seem to be on a moral
holiday.
Other texts in the early Confucian canon also tend to ignore the
problem of moral training in children. Two sections of The Record of Rituals
( Liji) address these issues, albeit in limited ways. These texts probably
postdate the Analects and reflect the efforts of authors to expound upon
aspects of ritual that go beyond discussions in the Analects. Some suggest a
very permissive approach toward children. Consider the seventh section of
the Inner Pattern ( neize) chapter of the Liji, which contrasts early
morning household requirements for children and adult family members:
.
The children go earlier to bed, and get up later, according to
their pleasure. There is no fixed time for their meals.49
However, sections 7680 specify a curriculum from early childhood
to adulthood:
. . .
When the
to use the
taught to]
[in a] low
of leather;
Introduction
..
. .
At six years, they were taught the numbers and the names of
the cardinal points; at the age of seven, boys and girls did not
occupy the same mat nor eat together; at eight, when going out
or coming in at a gate or door and going to their mats to eat
and drink, they were required to follow their elders: the teaching
of yielding to others was now begun; at nine, they were taught
how to number the days.
.
At ten, [the boy] went to a master outside and stayed with him
(even) overnight. He learned the [different classes of ] characters
and calculation; he did not wear his jacket or trousers of silk; in
his manners he followed his early lessons; morning and evening
he learned the behavior of a youth; he would ask to be exercised
in [reading] the tablets, and in the forms of polite conversation.
.
At thirteen, he learned music, and to repeat the odes, and to
dance the ko [of the duke of Zhou]. When a full-grown lad, he
danced the xiang [of King Wu]. He learned archery and chariot
driving. At twenty, he was capped, and first learned the [different classes of ] ceremonies, and might wear furs and silk. He
danced the da xia [of Yu] and attended sedulously to filial and
fraternal duties. He might become very learned, but did not teach
others[his object being still] to receive and not to give out.
.
...
At thirty, he had a wife and began to attend to the business
proper to a man. He extended his learning without confining it
19
20
Introduction
21
22
Imponderable Evidence
Beyond this bedrock level of learning, Wittgenstein discusses a second
level of mastery that concerns judging based on imponderable evidence.
He understands imponderable evidence as information containing one or
more factors that cannot be assessed or measured in exact terms, such as a
persons emotional state at a particular time. Such judging can be learned
through hints and suggestions. Even though his discussion focuses on the
specific question of whether or not there might be experts at judging the
genuineness of a persons feelings, we might consider this a discussion of an
example that would be relevant to other cases where judgments are based on
imponderable evidence. But even this level of mastery would rest on first
learning bedrock practices of the sort recently described, without which one
would lack basic competency, but would also later go beyond that mastery.
Consider what Wittgenstein says about judging others motives:
There is such a question as: Is this a reliable way of judging
peoples motives? But in order to be able to ask this we must
know what judging a motive means; and we do not learn this
by being told what motive is and what judging is.54
Introduction
23
Wittgensteins point here is that there are bedrock practices of judging a motive that must be learned as a condition of understanding what
judging a motive means. One already has to have mastered those basic
practices of attributing motives before the question of the reliability of the
method makes sense to the asker or to the listener of this question. But
then, he says we can distinguish two types of methodological investigations.
One is conceptual, having to do with the methods central to learning the
concept. The other is, let us say, psychological and has to do with what
would give us the most reliable result.55
Despite the bedrock practices we learn that make us competent to use
the term judging a motive, Wittgenstein says that there is in general no
agreement over the question of whether an expression of feeling is genuine
or not.56 When discussing agreement in mathematics, he tells us that
Mathematicians do not in general quarrel over the result of a calculation. (This is an important fact.) Were it otherwise . . . then
our concept of mathematical certainty would not exist.57
And because in the language-game of mathematics, quarrels in general
do not break out over the result of a calculation, mathematical certainty
is conceptually connected to complete agreement. However, certainty in
psychology, where there is generally no complete agreement, has its own
character.58 Certainty in psychologywhich, Wittgenstein says, we might
call subjective to mark the difference between the language-games of psychology and mathematicswould be dependent on expert judgment of
imponderable evidence, not on the learning of a technique that produces
the same results for all who have mastered the language-game.
Wittgensteins comments about whether such expert judgment can be
taught is crucial for his clarification of what the concept of expert judgment consists of. For how we teach it is conceptually constitutive of what
it is. He says,
Can someone be mans teacher in this? Certainly. From time
to time he gives him the right tip.This is what learning and
teaching are like here.What one acquires here is not a technique; one learns correct judgments. There are also rules, but
they do not form a system, and only experienced people can
apply them right. Unlike calculating rules.59
It is important to Wittgenstein that in the case of using imponderable evidence, we do not acquire a technique. But what does that mean?
24
Presumably,
learning a technique would be more straightforward. We know
that to learn a technique, learners are required to get the hang of the correct
sorts of similarities they should pay attention to, say, in projecting the concept of table to what is for them novel instances of tables. However, Wittgenstein emphasizes that the level of agreement on how to project a concept
is almost complete. We can also clarify the concept of table by saying, This
is a table, while pointing to a table, thereby providing a single paradigm
to be used in ones projection. But when it comes to weighing imponderable evidence, the projection onto novel cases, as well as the learning of the
concept, requires attending to multiple aspects of a persons conduct and
demeanor: what he says in other contexts, his body language, his tone in
expressing his feeling, what we know about his general character, the specific
context of the conduct, etc. Presumably, such expertise would also eventuate
in weighted judgments, where the person making or assessing judgments
of others could distinguish between those judgments that are possible but
weakly supported, versus those that are possible but strongly supported. If
people wanted to improve their ability to make weighted judgments, they
would seek out a person with this ability who had demonstrated success at
transmitting it to others. Short of that, they might seek out such a person
for advice when they need to make such judgments.
Just as Confucius takes seriously learning bedrock practices, one
of his disciples also acknowledges that the skill of addressing questions
involving imponderable evidence requires a higher-level of learning beyond
understanding bedrock practices, one used to address questions involving
imponderable evidence that can be tackled only by those who have a special
knack. Yan Hui, Confuciuss favorite student, describes Confucius as having
such a knack.
In one passage of the Analects, we find Yan Huis perspective on what
it is like to be guided by his master. This description could function as an
account by a novice describing what it is like to be guided by a teacher
with a knack for expert judgment when the novice lacks that ability:
. . . . .
.. . . .
. . .
Yan Yuan sighed admiringly, saying, The more I look upward
toward it (Confuciuss dao), the higher it seems. The more I dig
deeper into it, the more impenetrable it seems. When I see it
ahead, suddenly it is behind. Our Master is adept at guiding
Introduction
25
26
governing the practice and how to carry on with them, even if he cannot
articulate them as a system. The novice grasps the reality of the norms
governing the practices once removed, through his teacher. That being the
case, it is no wonder that a standard exchange between Confucius and his
interlocutor have to do with whether particular persons or actions exhibit
(ren) (goodness) and with how they might better understand and fulfill
the complex requirements of ren and its constitutive ideals.64
Indeed, the sort of perplexity that Yan Hui expresses would be natural
for the sort of teaching that Confucius engages in. His teaching, he claims,
requires a certain kind of student, one who can quickly figure out how to
carry on with practicing and mastering succeeding steps of Confuciuss way
by himself:
.. . . .
The Master said: If one isnt in the fen status (of seeking to
understand even if he hasnt yet understood), I wont guide
[open him, instruct] him. If one isnt in the status of fei [trying his best to express his intentions in words, even if he hasnt
yet expressed any single word], I wont guide him. If I mention
one corner and he doesnt infer to the other three same types
of corners, I wont repeat [my former instruction].65
This confirms the claim that Confucius teaches by hints and suggestions,
and the novice needs to grasp how to carry on to the next corners, that is,
intuitively go on to the next steps by himself.
There is, however, a possible problem with the distinction I have
drawn between learning bedrock practices and using imponderable evidence to make a judgment. We might wonder the following: why should
we think of Yan Huis confession in Analects 9.11 as referring to use of
imponderable evidence about fulfilling the multiple requirements of ren,
as opposed to talking about learning any less complex, bedrock practices
of ritual? I would like to suggest that passage 9.11 might be understood
in both ways. The more bedrock the practices are, the less the chance that
an adult, young adult, or disciple will describe his masters teaching in the
way Yan Hui does.66 The most basic levels of learning (bedrock practices)
would not be accompanied by the sort of phenomenological account that
Yan Hui gives. For at most bedrock levels of learning, a young child will
not have the conceptual and linguistic capacities that Yan Hui exhibits in
his account. We might, however, project such an adult sensibility onto
a child, as a way of characterizing the way the child advances beyond a
Introduction
27
stage of not grasping the concepts he is being taught. But this would be
no more than a projection.67
Despite the uncertainty of judgments based on imponderable evidence, it is possible to imagine two different approaches to these judgments.
We could argue that because the correctness of such judgments is uncertain,
we should count any one judgment to be as good or accurate as any other.
In contrast, we could argue that some judgments are more cogent than
others. It is clear that Wittgenstein opts for the latter approach. For even
though he admits there will be, in general, no agreement over whether
a persons feeling are genuine, he still allows that In general predictions
arising from judgments of those with better knowledge of people will be
more correct.68 Even so, Wittgenstein indicates that judgments based on
imponderable evidence sometimes can and even must be proved in some
other way. He gives the example of the chemical structure of a substance.
Imponderable evidence might convince us of the structure, but we would
still need to be able to demonstrate the correctness of this judgment by
appealing to consequences of the claim being true.
Whether there is such an alternative form of proof when considering
the best way to live ones life is by no means clear. It does not, however,
appear incoherent to think that some teachers might play a role in establishing a tradition through reputation for being better than others at making judgments about how to live well. Traditions could be formed around
examples of such judgment, and the traditions might flourish by transmitting examples of such judgments along with hints about how to make ones
own judgments. This possibility seems to be found in the Analects accounts
of Confucius as teacher. Though there might be disagreement about the
wisdom of judgments Confucius makes, the formation of such a tradition
will rest on substantial agreement about Confuciuss excellence as a teacher.
28
dont come to blows over it, for example. That belongs to the
scaffolding from which our language operates (for example,
yields descriptions.)69
So language itself, and our forms of life interconnected with it, are
based on agreements in the framework that make the form of life and related
language possible. Training in the language and the practices that make up
the form of life will insure basic levels of agreement, each appropriate to
its distinctive language and form of life.
But this form of agreement is not only practical. It is bound up with
our views about truth and falsehood. For when we judge in accordance with
those beliefs that make up our frame of reference, we believe that those
judgments correspond to reality. And we view our judgments as part of
reality not because we know that the inferences based on our framework
beliefs assure that our judgments are certain, but because this is what it
means for our judgments to correspond to reality. Consider this point,
from On Certainty:
[Everything that we regard as evidence indicates that the earth
already existed long before my birth. The contrary hypothesis
has nothing to confirm it at all. If everything speaks for an
hypothesis and nothing against it, is it objectively certain? One
can call it that. But does it necessarily agree with the world of
facts? At the very best it shows us what agreement means. We
find it difficult to imagine it to be false, but also difficult to
make use of.] [Inside brackets crossed out in ms.] What does
this agreement consist in, if not in the fact that what is evidence
in these language-games speaks for our proposition? (Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus)70
Wittgensteins point is that the meaning of agrees with reality is constituted by the frame of reference we operate with. So in mathematics, to
agree with mathematical reality just means to operate by the rules of the
framework of mathematics.
But this view can certainly seem problematic. And Wittgenstein confronts this problem head on: his philosophical voice, tempting him toward
a problematic philosophical theory, asks:
So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true
and false?What is true or false is what human beings say; and
Introduction
29
30
of thinking and acting and as parts of a form of life, then they would not
be parts of that framework.
It is important to recognize that peaceful agreement and the related
phenomenon of disputes not breaking out does not indicate complete agreement about every opinion a person might have. Indeed, Wittgenstein makes
it clear that although in some frameworks disputes do not break out, they
do in others: for example, in psychology. In the previous section, I discussed
one example from psychology: attributions of feelings to others. There is
good reason to think of disputes in ethics as being akin to these, for questions of what to do next often involve weighing and balancing of competing
requirements with no clear system of judgment, even though we might distinguish between better and worse judgments. Each framework of thinking
and language has its own distinctive peaceful agreements and related range
of disputes, along with ways of resolving them. These peaceful agreements
are the basic practices and beliefs that masters convey to novices, thereby
making them competent to engage in assessment of opinions in dispute.
This sort of peaceful agreement constitutes what it is to be able to act
on and understand shared norms, which Wittgenstein says is basic for any
language: For only through a technique can we grasp a regularity.74 The
phenomenon of language is based on regularity, on agreement in action.75
But this means that language itself and the normative regularities that constitute it depend on group harmony. Williams makes this point as follows:
But even solitary practices are cultural practices and so have a
social dimension since the context of regularity and agreement in
judgment (in what is said) must be provided by a community,
that is, by a group of people reacting, judging, and behaving in
harmony. They owe their identity to this social background even
though they may be carried out by one individual at a time.
Without conformity to a group at bedrock level, normativity
is impossible.76
Although Confuciuss appeals to harmony (he) are not extensive,
it would not be hard to find some common ground with Wittgensteins
insights about the relations among agreement, normativity, and learning.
Consider the following passage, in which Youzi distinguishes between illicit
and licit harmony:
. . .. . .
.. . .
Introduction
31
32
Nothing Is Hidden
For Wittgenstein, the project of mastery of language-games is complex,
and mastery differs from language-game to language-game. So Wittgenstein
points out that certainty, a mark of mastery, differs from language-game to
language-game.80 The type of certainty of mathematics involves complete
agreement, whereas psychological certainty does not. These two forms of
certainty are not thought by Wittgenstein to rest on some fundamental
principles found in mathematics that are lacking in psychology. Rather, they
rest on the fundamental differences between the two different languagegames. Even in mathematics a teachers ability to formulate his teaching in
clear principles and definitions will come to an end. At best, the teacher
will be able to exhibit his own mastery by showing how to calculate. So,
for example, if I wish to teach my student the meaning of the formula X
+ 1 = Y, I will be able to show what that means by solving the formula
for various numbers until the novice is able to solve them himself.
In discussing how the master communicates to a novice how to follow
a rule, Wittgenstein says:
We talk and act. That is already presupposed in everything that
I am saying.
I say to him Thats right, and this expression is the bearer
of a tone of voice, a gesture. I leave him to it. Or I say No!
and hold him back.
18. And does this mean that following a rule is indefinable?
No. I can surely define it in countless ways. Only definitions
are no use to me in these considerations.81
Wittgensteins point here is that if the teacher is to communicate his
understanding to the novice, he will do that best and for the most part by
showing him how to proceed with the formula. One might think that he
could communicate his understanding by giving the student definitions of
the parts of a formula. However, Wittgensteins point against this suggestion is that multiple definitions are possible, but what we want is not for
Introduction
33
34
Introduction
35
the sense of the hidden, the novice only needs to master the practice for
himself. And the Master teaches all novices how to do that. The Masters
understanding consists in the practices and set of judgments in particular
circumstances that he teaches.
For this reason, Confucius points out that he would rather not speak
in the course of teaching:
.... . .
. . . .
Our Master said: I intend not to speak. Zigong said: If you
do not talk, then how should the youngsters (know how to)
say anything? Our Master said, What does Heaven say? The
four seasons operate thereby; the various (living) things engender
themselves thereby. What does Heaven say?88
Heaven influences nature and all living creatures but not by speaking, just
as a master influences novices but not always by speaking. If both Confucius
and Wittgenstein are correct, their approach to teaching is not deficient;
instead, it clarifies the way to teach complex, bedrock practices to novices.
For Wittgenstein, understanding basic concepts, and so understanding
their applications to particular cases, requires applying concepts to their
range of instances, organized through family resemblance, not through necessary and sufficient conditions.89 This approach to teaching and learning
does not undermine the intelligibility of the concept, but it does require an
understanding, primarily in the form of practical mastery, of how to apply
concepts in various ways. So, Wittgenstein makes the point in his most
famous example, the concept of games, where game applies to a variety
of more or less similar things.90 To grasp the concept of game requires
mastery of the application of game to this variety of entities, along with a
sensitivity to the differences between types of games. Because of his account
of concepts and his view that philosophical investigations aim to clarify
concepts, which are usually organized through a complex web of similarities,
Wittgenstein conceives his form of philosophical investigation as traveling
criss-cross in order to grasp the complexity of language and concepts and
to avoid the temptation of stopping prematurely by settling for an overly
simplistic account of the conceptual terrain under investigation.91
It is also useful to think of Confuciuss method as a criss-cross method
of cultivation, teaching novices how to understand and put dao into practice. Confuciuss reluctance to offer single general formulae for (ren) and
other dao-constituents and his tendency to offer different characterizations
36
of dao and its constitutive ideas give evidence for this interpretation, as
does Yan Huis phenomenology of learning to follow dao. The labyrinthine
character of dao rests on the complexity of the norms that constitute dao
and its language.
We might think of both thinkers as adopting a form of what James
Klagge has called constitutivism.92 This is the view that with respect to
some concepts, what counts as instantiating them is variable. In different contexts, different behaviors or qualities count as good, for example.
Goodness consists of a complex array of elements in different contexts. As
Klagge points out, although Wittgenstein never developed a settled view
of the concept of goodness, at one point, he indicates that what counts as
good may be so complex that all one can do to clarify it is to describe a
whole environment.93 This would be a possible explanation of why Yan
Hui thought finding out how to carry on and take the next step was so
difficult. It might also go some way toward explaining why it is that Confucius answers the What about ren? questions in so many different ways.
There is no doubt that Confucius brings a different set of concerns
to dao compared with the concerns Wittgenstein brings to investigating
concepts. Confucius is also interested in how to foster self-cultivation of
his interlocutors. Teaching them an entire way of life requires him to offer
different characterizations of dao-constituents to different interlocutors.94
In contrast, Wittgenstein illustrates a method of engaging in philosophical
therapy. He displays the variable instantiations of concepts, thereby reducing
philosophical puzzlement and torment.95
Introduction
37
Confuciuss cultivation of the dao project are worlds apart, not just in
time, but also in goals and methods. In the last section of this chapter, I
would like to provide a general response to this objection and to indicate
the ways in which these similarities provide the basis for the arguments of
subsequent chapters.
The objection supposes that distance in time and project might be
sufficient to make holding insights in common impossible. I will ignore the
problem of distance in time as that is not fundamental by itself. Distance in
time is just a symbol of fundamental differences in concepts and projects.
The criticism raises the question: what insights do the two philosophers
hold in common or share? In this context, the argument that Confucius
and Wittgenstein hold something in common rests on two fundamental
claims: (a) that the ways they formulate their views of our relations to
norms governing living well (dao) share a family resemblance; and (b) that
they follow similar procedures in addressing misunderstanding or norms. I
will address each point in turn.
I have argued that Wittgenstein and Confucius take learning to be the
basic path to understanding norms (or dao). If my claim about this point is
wrong, that should come out in criticism of my specific interpretive arguments. But beyond that, one might argue that whereas Confucius promotes
learning as a way of understanding and conforming to dao, he does not
make the sorts of philosophical claims that Wittgenstein does. Wittgenstein
claims that the ways a person learns a concept are constitutive of what the
concept means. Nowhere does Confucius make such a claim. In fact, he
appears not to be interested in the philosophical question of the relation
of learning to conceptual content. This argument supposes that holding an
insight in common requires holding it in the same way. But this requirement would seem to be too stringent. We might, for example, argue that
Democritus and Newton shared a common insight about the basic structure
of the substances without holding that they made the same claim in the
same ways about them. Moreover, I would agree that Confucius makes no
general claims about the content of concepts, but that does not undermine
the claim that he seeks to promote understanding of dao (consciously living a good life) through mastery of basic practices. Although Confuciuss
cultivation project rests on his insight about dao, which he does not define,
develop, and defend theoretically, Wittgenstein formulates a similar insight
and proceeds to use it to resolve philosophical puzzles.
One might also argue that although Wittgenstein formulates an
insight, he does not show an interest in promoting moral self-cultivation.
Yet, neither of these true claims entails that the two thinkers do not hold
38
Confucius, Wittgenstein,
and the Problem of Moral Disagreement
Here we may say that we have all the materials of a tragedy; and we
could only say: Well, God help you.
Wittgenstein to Rush Rhees1
To use a word without justification does not mean to use it wrongfully.
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 289
Introduction
In the previous chapter, I argued that Confucius and Wittgenstein share
some basic approaches to their projects despite fundamental differences in
time, context, and their reflective goals. One insight they share is that the
contents of ideals and concepts are constituted by the ways in which the
practices that instantiate them are learned. Beyond these basic insights,
nothing about ideals and concepts is hidden. Nonetheless, even though
we can display mastery of those practices and describe what this mastery
consists of, we cannot offer general formulae for the use of these concepts
or ideals because they are learned only by learning how to engage in a
complex practice. And for this reason, explanations of these concepts and
ideals are of limited help in training children, students, or adherents and
in attempts at clarification of what constitutes the concepts and ideals. If
this basic insight is correctwe cannot offer general formulae for the concepts or ideals of either philosopherthen it would be a mistake to argue
that Confucius and Wittgenstein fail to give us the types of accounts we
need: namely, foundational theories that would provide an explanation and
39
40
41
those who operate with what he would consider a heterodox set of norms,
which, as we can see from Analects 2.16, he considers harmful:
. . .3
If you are researching on different doctrines, then this is already
harmful.
Here we can see that Confuciuss approach to disagreement involves
holding onto his own commitments, which he uses to comment on those
who operate with another approach, but he does not discuss his views with
those who operate with radically disparate commitments:
. . . .
. . . . .
. . . . .
.. . . . .
. , . , .
. . . . .4
Zilu, a disciple of Confucius, fell behind while following Confucius on the trip. He met an old man who carried a basket on
his shoulder with a cane. Zilu asked him, saying: Have you seen
my master? The old man replied, As for one, four limbs are not
hard working and cannot distinguish five types of grain who can
serve as your master? He weeded while putting aside his cane.
Zilu stood before him, while paying respect. He kept Zilu and
had him stay the night. The old man revived Zilu by killing and
cooking a fowl, made millet, and fed him. He introduced Zilu to
his two sons. The next day, Zilu reported this to his master after
catching up with the rest of the group. The Master said, They
are recluses. He sent Zilu back to see him. When he arrived, the
old man had already left. Zilu said to his Master: Not taking
office is not righteous. The distinction between older and younger
cant be abolished. As for the righteousness between sovereign and
ministers, how could it be set aside? In keeping his conduct pure,
he neglects the major relationships. As for a junzis (exemplary
persons) taking office, it involves doing his duty, righteous actions.
The way does not prevail. We already know this.
42
.. . . ?
. . . . .
. ..5
The Free Spirit of Chu, Jieyu, passed Confuciuss chariot while
singing. Jieyu said, How pitiful the Phoenix is! Why has your
virtue declined to such an extent? What is past, one is not able
to criticize. What is coming, one still can pursue. Give up! Give
up! One who today engages in government service is merely
dangerous. Confucius got down from his chariot and intended
to speak with Jieyu. Quickly Jieyu hurried off. Confucius was
unable to speak with him.
In both these cases, Confucius or his disciple, Zilu, comes into contact with
a recluse. Both attempt to engage the recluses in discourse, but they run
off. Confucius is robbed of a chance to debate them. If we assume, as I do,
that for all we know these passages are fictional,6 we can imagine that they
might have been told differently. They might have involved an encounter
with Confucius and a sustained argumentative discussion. What should we
make of this? The Analects often shows the proper approach to a situation
through Confuciuss actions rather than through spelling out and defending
some principle governing how to act. So we might take this hint and try
to understand these two passages as illustrating an exemplary approach to
disagreement over the basic norms governing conduct. The recluses hold up
the ideal of purity in the face of moral decline (as in the old mans gracious
hospitality toward a stranger and Jieyus criticism of Confucius for being
a government lackey), whereas Confucius upholds fulfilling ones duties to
others and reviving dao. Confucius never is shown to engage the recluses
in discussions of these normative disagreements. Why not?7
We might find part of an answer by looking at an encounter with
Zaiwo, a disciple, whose normative commitments depart radically from
those of Confucius. This encounter is similar to the encounter with the
recluses, though in this case Confucius and Zaiwo talk a bit.
. . .
. . . . . .8
Zaiwo asked a question by commenting: The three-year mourning period, its duration is already too long. If a junzi (exemplary
43
person) does not conduct rituals for three years, the rituals will
certainly go bad. If a junzi does not engage in music for three
years, his practice of music will certainly fall apart. New grain
has already been sent to market, and the old grain is already
gone. The drill and flint stone for making fire have changed. A
full year of mourning is already enough.
. . . . . ..
. . . . .
. . .
Our Master replied: Eating rice and wearing colored silk, to you,
would be comfortable? Yes, comfortable. If you are comfortable,
then do it. As a junzi during the mourning period, he doesnt
feel satisfied in eating fat meat, is without pleasure listening to
music, conducts daily affairs without peace, and for this reason
he does not do these things. If you feel settled, then why not
do it? Zaiwo left.
. . . .
,. .
Our Master said, Zaiwos not complying with ren! A son has
already been born three years; only after this, can he leave the
bosom of his parents. The three-year mourning period is understood everywhere. And Zaiwo, was he not loved by his mother
and father for those first three years?
In this exchange, Confucius does not engage Zaiwo in any extensive debate.
He does not try to persuade him of the incorrectness of his views. Indeed,
he makes the point that if he is comfortable with a shorter mourning
period, then he should do that. Outside of the context of some shared commitments, shared dialogue, criticism, or helpful suggestions about how to
change to conform to dao would not be productive. The basic insight that
Confucius brings to this discussion is that sensitivity and responsiveness to
norms (dao) arises from learning. But just as successful reflection depends
on prior learning, successful instruction rests on accepting the authority of
ones teacher and his normative commitments.
This general approach to disagreement is encapsulated in Analects 9.30:
44
. . . . .
. .
Some [who are] able to study together have not yet been able to
reach the Way. Some [are] able together to get to the Way [but]
are not necessarily able to stand firmly on the upright way. Some
[are] able firmly to stand together on the upright Way [but] are
This passage indicates limits to complete agreement. Two people might study
together the norms governing human life, but they may not make the same
progress. Even if they make the same progress, they may not have the same
commitment to upright conduct. But even if they have the same commitment to upright conduct, they need not weigh and balance considerations
about how to act in the same manner. This passage seems to me to be both
cautionary and expressive of a kind of resignation. There are indeed limits
to agreement. Confuciuss manner of addressing disagreements accepts these
limits rather than trying to resolve them.10
For moralists, however, this approach might seem inadequate. If Confucius and his followers take up this stance toward moral disagreement,
one might argue, they miss an opportunity to correct an error, but they
also miss an opportunity to demonstrate the objective, correct approach to
these norms. But because Confucius takes learning of practices of ritual to
be basic and to be mastered prior to reflection, he is skeptical about the
possibility of resolution of disagreements between those who lack shared
bedrock practices.
I have argued that Wittgenstein and Confucius maintain similar
insights of the role of bedrock practices in understanding norms. Their
shared commitments can be characterized as follows: our primary relationship to norms arises through learning.
Wittgenstein uses this insight to address philosophical accounts of normativity that produce conceptual puzzlement. For example, he argues that
an account of norms that thinks of understanding rule-following as resting
on a persons interpretation cannot make sense of the distinction between
correct and incorrect actions. For any interpretation might itself be variously
interpreted. He concludes that there must be a form of understanding a
rule that is not an interpretation. Instead, this form of understanding is
based on custom or practice, something transmitted from master to novice.
Although Wittgenstein does not develop a moral project of self-cultivation
based on this insight about our primary relation to norms, Confucius does
just this. He focuses on learning as the means by which a child or disciple
45
46
47
our focus should be from what moral life must be like to what it actually
is in everyday life.16
Realism in the sense in which the realistic spirit practices it is,
then, whether in or out of ethics, opposed to forms of philosophical obscurantism, which depend on fantasies of how things must be. To be realistic in
this sense is to oppose appeals to a philosophical fantasy, one that appears
to make sense, but is really nonsense and that makes no difference to us
in any case.17
The Realistic Spirit Protects the Moral Insights of Common Humanity
Diamond develops her account of the realistic spirits approach to ethics to
show how bad ethical theories, with their related philosophical mythologies, cause us to construct stupid, insensitive, or crazy moral arguments,
arguments which are capable of hiding our own genuine ethical insights
from ourselves.18 She offers, as an example of such stupid or insensitive
arguments, the philosophical view that the justification for experimenting
on animals comes from recognizing that we humans have something that
the animals lack: reason. If we hold that rational beings deserve protection, we then can argue, she says, that it would be easier to experiment on
retarded humans than on normal human beings. For retarded humans either
lack intelligence or have less of it than normal human beings, who deserve
protection. This fantasy, then, leads to utter blindness to what common
humanity recognizes.19
The Realistic Spirit Examines Established Usages or Words Placed in the
Context of Our Complicated Form of Life
In response to Onora ONeills criticism20 that Diamond holds the so-called
Wittgensteinian view that all justification is relative to locally accepted
practice,21 Diamond makes the fundamentally important, self-described
impatient response that the realistic spirit opposes constructing any prior
philosophical requirements on what counts as justification. Instead, the
realistic spirit looks to examination of how justification works within our
complicated form of life.22 Diamonds response to ONeill is illuminating:
Justification, in ethics as anywhere else, goes on within lives
we share with others, but what we make count in that life is
not laid down in advance. The force of what we are able to say
48
depends on its relation to the life of the words we use, the place
of those words in our lives, and we may make the words tell by
argument, by image, by poetry, by Socratic re-description, by
aphorism, by Humean irony, by proverbs, by all sorts of old and
new things. And the judgment whether we produce illumination
or obfuscation by doing so, the judgment whether there is truth
in our words or self-deception, is not in general something on
which there will be agreement.23
Crucial to Diamonds response to ONeills criticism are her claims
that (1) what we make count in life need not be laid down in advance,
(2) the force of our words depends on the life of those words in our lives,
and (3) the effectiveness of our words depends on the variety of ways we
make those words work for us in terms of argument, imagery, and so forth.
Because of these features of our thinking about what counts as important,
there is no single way, specified in advance, to reach out to others to persuade them of our ethical standpoint.
This response to ONeill reflects a central feature of the realistic spirits
approach to philosophy; it informs and is informed by the way Diamond
interprets Wittgensteins use of language-games in his philosophical investigations. For even if examination of language-games plays a role in liberating
us from preconceptions about how things must be, his examination of how
words get used is not limited to that. For some uses of words take place
outside of any language-games, and even language-games take place in the
larger context of our complicated human form of life. Diamond captures
this aspect of the realistic spirits approach to philosophical investigation
by talking about her investigation of the commerce of our lives,24 while
Stanley Cavell captures this aspect of Wittgensteins investigation of forms
of life by referring to the whirl of organism.25
The Realistic Spirit Rejects the Philosophical Ideal of
Complete Moral Agreement
Based on the way in which the realistic spirit embraces the commerce of
our lives, it also does not presuppose any prior account of the extent to
which moral agreement is desirable or even possible, according to Diamond.
This is a topic to be investigated by examining moral agreement in the
commerce of our lives. The realistic spirit recognizes that agreement plays
a different role in morality than it does in mathematics. And Diamond
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arise out of its own normative commitments. Even though the realistic
spirits project does not rise to a full-blown project of moral self-cultivation,
it does offer a therapeutic project, focused on rooting out unhealthy forms
of understanding and promoting healthy forms of understanding that are
suited to protect the variety of things and actions that goes by the term
morality.30
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Thus there is no reason to think that Confucius would have held that these
forms of learning encompass the whole of dao. Given his focus on broad
learning and his reluctance to define ideals, it would make sense that he
would leave the self-cultivation syllabus open-ended.
The Confucian realistic spirit has as one of its primary activities the
collection of and reflection on exemplars of wise judgment, action, and
attitude that can serve as guidance for later generations of individuals seeking to live in conformity with dao. In the Analects, Confucius and his
interlocutors discuss the exemplary conduct of a varied cast of characters,
some of whom embody the ideal of (ren) and some of whom are good
in some respects but are not obviously fulfilling the ideal of (ren). This
collection of exemplars forms a set of moral precedents; even if they need
to be interpreted, the exemplars establish a basis upon which people can
learn how to orient themselves to others and make reasonable judgments
and decisions. In large part, the text of the Analects itself is a collection of
exemplary discussions of problems associated with moral self-cultivation.
Those discussions function for later thinkers in much the same way that
The Book of Documents and The Book of Songs functioned for Confucius:
to guide reflection and action by appeal to exemplars. In his case, however,
the exemplars are not only the historical examples he mentions but also
include the variety of ways he himself intervenes to get his interlocutors to
change their conduct and reflect better about dao.
Confucian Non-Reductionist View of Dao
Connected with this broad canon of study, the Confucian realistic spirit
seeks to avoid one-sidedness in its ideals and conduct. This ideal is best
encoded in Confuciuss critique of various forms of so-called spiritual purity, which rest on absolute approval and disapproval of some limited forms
of behavior, which, though good in some aspects, do not encompass the
whole of good behavior. As he says in the Analects of the narrow moral
purists:
. .
I am different from them. I have no absolutely certain approval
or disapproval.38
And of those who associate themselves with one party or another to a
dispute, he says:
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. . . . .
An exemplary persons attitude toward the people and events in
the whole empire is without biased affirmation or biased rejection. Doing the appropriate thing is what he follows.39
Both of these passages reflect Confuciuss awareness of the problem of onesidedness in living and reflecting on what is important. It is all too tempting
to identify an ideal and then mistakenly take it to be the whole of dao.
I have argued that Confuciuss commitment to a type of practical, embodied realism about dao and its cultivation shares similarities
with Wittgensteins realistic spirit. But it should be possible to make even
clearer what it means to think of both as embodying a spirit. I turn to
this question next.
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Either the realistic spiritin Confuciuss or Wittgensteins versionsadopts some a priori moral principle that shows how to
resolve moral disagreement, or it does not. If the realistic spirit
adopts such a principle, then the spirit contradicts its aim of
liberation from all such requirements. If the realistic spirit does
not adopt such a principle, it has no adequate way (according to
traditional philosophical theory) to address moral disagreement.49
From the vantage point of traditional philosophical theory, it can
appear that the correct way to diagnose the problem posed in this dilemma
is in terms of the way the realistic spirit forgoes any appeal to philosophical
ideals of justification set up in advance of encountering moral disagreement.
Once a realistic spirit forgoes appeals to such theoretical ideals, so the diagnosis goes, it lacks resources to know how to address disagreement. But this
diagnosis supposes that the only way to address disagreement is by appeal
to those very sorts of philosophical ideals that the realistic spirit eschews.
I offer an alternative: the problem for the realistic spirit of managing
disagreement can be resolved by support from the resources of a Confucianstyle tradition. For Confucius has as one of his primary activities, and so
cares about, the collection of and reflection on exemplars of wise judgment,
action, and attitude that can serve as guidance for later generations of
individuals seeking to live in conformity with dao. And this very collection
can help aid in the resolution of disagreements, not by establishing clear
and distinct a priori criteria of right and wrong, but rather by creating
a repository of different types of moral exemplars. Those who choose to
emulate and reflect on such exemplars may, in so doing, learn to produce
just those sorts of modes of judgment and habits of behavior that could
improve their chances of resolving moral disagreements.50
Of course, Wittgenstein was aware of such a possibility. In Rush
Rheess report of his discussion of ethics with Wittgenstein in 1942, Rhees
describes Wittgensteins attempt to find an example of an ethical problem.
What emerges is interesting for this discussion as they end up talking about
different types of ethical problems. One problemnot the only typeis the
problem that arises when a person who is outside of any moral tradition
considers various ways to characterize and prioritize alternative actions. A
man thinks he cannot continue to devote himself to his full-time cancer
research and remain married. What follow are various forms of reasoning he
and his friend who is counseling him may engage in. We might call these
forms of reasoning for short various considerations. One consideration
is that he took his wife out of her previous life to be married to him,
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On this reflective rather than determinant understanding of criteria and grammar, there simply is no space for the straightforward
assumption of impersonal linguistic authority....If one finds
this [reflexive] model of philosophical interlocution more true
to Wittgensteins practice than its determinant alternative, then
it will be plain that any and every Wittgensteinian philosophical
exercise will place rigorous ethical demands upon its practitioners.
For it will require them to acknowledge and respect the otherness of ones otherher equal claim to authority over how to
go on with words, her claim to be taken seriously as someone
who is attempting to say something meaningful, her right to be
the final arbiter of ones claim to represent a better way of going
on, to say yes or no to ones offer of communityin everything
one says and does.57
If Mulhalls analysis is correct, then he has provided one more way to
make sense out of the pervasiveness in philosophical investigations of Wittgensteins ethical commitments.58 This commitment would be to engage in
philosophical investigation with the full recognition that ones interlocutor
has the right to be the final arbiter of any claim to represent the better way
of going on in applying concepts and making judgments.
Not only will Mulhalls analysis provide another way, implicit in the
realistic spirits approach to philosophy, to explain the pervasive ethical
character of his philosophical investigations, it also basically challenges my
argument that the realistic spirit needs to find some way to manage irresolvable disagreement, to know when it is tolerable and when it is not.59 Mulhalls account also challenges my account of the fundamental similarities of
Confuciuss project to Wittgensteins. Mulhalls Wittgenstein is aligned with
liberal individualism in a way that Confuciuss appeal to traditional, cultural
authority is not.60 But perhaps these problems do not matter so much, for,
as I will now argue, Mulhalls representation of the moral implications of
Wittgensteins view of rule-following in other ways violates the realistic
spirits approach to ethics. Rather than spelling out the implications of the
realistic spirits approach to ethics, Mulhalls view contradicts it.
The realistic spirits primary commitment in philosophical investigations is to look and see and to ensure that it not draw premature conclusions
based on a narrow range of examples or on some prior view of how things
must be. But Mulhall generalizes from a single example in Wittgenstein,
the example of the deviant pupil who persists in applying a rule in a way
different from the way the teacher accepts as correct. In this example, the
student is asked to apply the formula X + 2. The student successfully does
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so up until he reaches 1,000 and then continues with 1004, 1008, and so
forth.61 Following Cavell, Mulhall argues that Wittgenstein uses this example
to show that the teacher has no authority over the student. If the student
proceeds differently, this shows that he rejects the authority of the teacher,
both Cavell and Mulhall maintain.62
According to Cavell and Mulhall, Wittgensteins example is meant to
show that disagreement about how to go on is, in principle, always irresolvable and that the teacher cannot ever be said to represent the correct
application. In the face of disagreement, all the teacher can do is invite the
student to accept her approach. But it is never wrong if the student refuses
to do so. He has the absolute right to make his own decision.
But what ever happened to the realistic spirits appreciation of this
complicated form of life? We can imagine a continuum of cases, including
one in which the teacher demands and expects absolute conformity to his
teaching and does so as a representative of a moral community whom he
represents as teacher. These examples are a dime a dozen. The fact that a
deviant student might find it reasonable to go on in a nonstandard way that
he can explain and insists on doing does not mean that the teacher must
accept his approach or grant him any right to determine what the correct
way is. The opposite end of the continuum is the one that Mulhall discusses.
For surely what Wittgenstein wants to show by the example of deviancy is that such an example is possible and that the logic of a formula
presented outside of the context of concrete bedrock practices does not
require going on in any particular way, not that all examples of teaching
follow this model. So in this example, perhaps, we have an example where
it makes sense to say that the student takes himself to have an absolute right
to accept or refuse the authority of the teacher. But if so, this right does
not arise, I would argue, solely from the fact that the prior applications of
a rule do not by themselves determine future applications. Instead, this right
emerges, if at all, from some prior ethical commitments. In the context of
a liberal culture that resists the authority of teachers and tradition, it may
make good sense, at least in some contexts, for the teacher and student
both to agree that the student has a right to go on as he sees fit. (I would,
however, not agree that even in a liberal culture, simple arithmetic would
be such a context.)
It is, moreover, not likely that Wittgenstein takes his example to show
what Mulhall thinks it shows. Indeed, when Wittgenstein raises the question
of the criteria for applying concepts in this sentence: The way the formula
is meant determines which steps are to be taken, he indicates that it is
the kind of way we always use it, were taught to use it.63 If the way we
are taught to use it, through the master-novice relationship (see Chapter 1
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with the sign S and write this sign in a calendar for every day
on which I have the sensation.I first want to observe that a
definition of the sign cannot be formulated.But still I can give
one to myself as a kind of ostensive definition.How? Can I
point to the sensation? Not in the ordinary sense. But I speak,
or write the sign down, and at the same time I concentrate
my attention on the sensationand so, as it were, point to
it inwardly.But what is this ceremony for? For that is all it
seems to be! A definition serves to lay down the meaning of a
sign doesnt it?Well, that is done precisely by the concentrating of my attention; for in this way I commit to memory the
connection between the sign and the sensation.But I commit
to memory can only mean: this process brings it about that
I remember the connection correctly in the future. But in the
present case, I have no criterion of correctness. One would like
to say: whatever is going to seem correct to me is correct. And
that only means that here we cant talk about correct.64
But, as Wittgenstein says, in the present case I have no criterion of
correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me
is right. And that only means that here we cant talk about right. But
the attitude of whatever seeming right to me is right is just the attitude
of a person who takes himself as final arbiter.65 What Mulhall rules in,
Wittgenstein rules out.
Perhaps the cautionary conclusion that we must come to in light of
the problem of Mulhalls account is that we should proceed with care in
articulating Wittgensteins approach to moral disagreement. We should also
come to see that how deviancy will be handled and described very much
depends on the context in which the teaching takes place. There is no single
possible approach.
I have argued, however, that whatever pressure might be felt by the
charge that the realistic spirits approach to ethics results in irresolvable disagreement can be managed. The realistic spirit can, if it sees fit, find ways to
address disagreement within the context of the basic insights it shares with
early Confucianism. For as I argued in Chapter 1, the learning of bedrock
practices and basic concepts embedded in them does not make possible a
novices questioning the masters authority. Moreover, even when a person
weighs imponderable evidence, some people are able to do that better
than others and are in a position to teach others to replicate their success.
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But even these resources aside, the Confucian tradition offers emulation of
examples as a further resource for resolving moral disagreement without
appeal to accounts of a priori ethical principles.
The Confucian tradition collects exemplars of moral conduct, along
with proverbs, exemplary dialogues, practices of memorization of canonical
passages, exemplary modes of teaching, and handing down of interpretations within the context of established lineage. The tradition also encourages children to accept the authority of parents and teachers as one way
to deal with moral disagreement without feeling compelled to contradict
itself by accepting some other single basic principle of ethics, articulated
in advance, as the only possible way to distinguish between tolerable and
intolerable disagreement.
I have not, however, argued that the realistic spirit must become Confucian, though I would insist that the realistic spirit would benefit from
an examination of the ways exemplars are collected and interpreted within
a tradition and how they might impact a persons understanding of how
to apply a rule and transmit norms. This might be part of the larger form
of life, demonstrating how moral concepts can get their meaning and how
disagreements can be dealt with. Certainly, the realistic spirit can approach
the problems of ethics in this more or less Confucian way without pain of
self-contradiction. Indeed, it is a way for the realistic spirit to give procedural
content to its commitment to protect what common humanity recognizes
without establishing prior idealized principles of justification. And in following this path, the realistic spirit need not assume in advance how much
agreement such a tradition will generate. It need only rest assured that it
has an approach to moral disagreement consistent with its own spirit, one
that avoids a dogmatic appeal to philosophical accounts of justification
adopted in advance of investigation and without falling into a Mulhall-type
dogmatic moral individualism.
This argument offers a defense of the realistic spirit, as it shows up in
Wittgensteins later philosophy, against the charge that ethics done in this
spirit cannot manage moral disagreement. If my argument about the fundamental similarities between Confuciuss realistic spirit and Wittgensteins
holds, both projects have resources to manage moral disagreement and can
do so without appeal to foundational ethical theories. It will be my burden
in the rest of this book to argue in more detail how, by utilizing forms of
critique central to Wittgensteins realistic spirit in ethics, it is possible to
resolve fundamental outstanding interpretive and evaluative debates over
Confuciuss self-cultivation and a Wittgensteinian reflective project in ethics.
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Overview
In this chapter, I take up a network of connected problems having to do
with how to read and understand the Analects in light of history. Certain
models of meaning for texts, such as the Analects that naturally suggest
themselves to interpreters, create puzzles about whether the Analects sentences (sayings) have any meaning at all and, if they do have meaning,
whether we can know them.
Two recent discussions of meaning show the problem we face when
thinking about the Analects meaning: Following the model of reader
response theories of meaning, Daniel Gardner argues that there is no meaning to the sentences of the Analects, just various attributions of meaning
made by commentators over time. He would say that there is no single
meaning for any of the sentences of the Analects.1 We can refer to this view
of meaning as semantic nihilism: The Analects has no real meaning of its own.
A somewhat less extreme approach to the meaning of the Analects can
be found in John Makehams recent work on the Analects commentarial
tradition.2 Makeham draws a distinction between historical and scriptural
meaning, which he uses in defense of his semantic skepticism: We cannot
know the meanings of the sentences of the Analects. Historical meaning
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is what the Analects meant to its authors and audience at the time of its
writing. Scriptural meaning is what the text has meant to subsequent
readers who, one way or another through creative interpretations, believe
that they have found their own view of the Truth, writ large, revealed in
the Analects. Given the limitation of knowledge of the language and history
of the time in which the Analects was written, Makeham despairs of capturing the historical meaning of the Analects but worries that the adoption of
scriptural meanings or the acceptance that the sentences can be interpreted
variously will lead to an unlimited number of meanings, personal to each
readers view of the Truth.3
It might seem natural to conclude from this account of two different
types of meaning that the more we focus on the history of the Analects,
the less confident we can be that there are any overall meanings or knowable meanings of the sentences of the Analects. A recent work by E. Bruce
Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks, which offers a detailed account of when the
various passages of the Analects were written, shows what it would take
to find specific historical cues that would guide our dating of the text.4
Although Brooks and Brooks believe they have made a reasonable case for
the dating that they have offered, others have found their efforts speculative
at best.5 The difficulty of dating passages and using that dating to defend
context-sensitive interpretations plays well into the hands of interpreters,
like Makeham, who have found no knowable meanings whatsoever in the
Analects. I will, however, argue that Gardners and Makehams arguments
should be rejected. Here is why: There are two necessary but distinct sources
that give rise to their conclusions. The first is the indisputable set of facts
that the historical evidence we have about the meanings of the sentences in
the Analects is limited, and this limited evidence sometimes leaves us in a
situation of not being sure how to decide between possible interpretations.
As a result, different interpreters have offered different interpretations of the
Analects. But these facts of the indeterminacy of meaning and multiplicity of interpretations by themselves do not support Makehams semantic
skepticism or Gardners semantic nihilism. Only when they combine these
facts with their accounts of meaning are they able to support their conclusions. I will argue that their accounts of meaning are problematic, thereby
making their arguments for semantic nihilism and semantic skepticism
inconclusive.
They adopt the following claims about meaning:
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realistic,
albeit philosophical fiction concerning a character named Confucius,
revealed through his conversations with and relations to his interlocutors.
The lack of historical evidence, however, undermines our interpretations of
the Analects sentences no more or less than the absence of direct historical
evidence undermines our interpretations of other forms of fiction.
In the sixth section, I argue against Makehams solution of the problem of semantic skepticism. This section sets the stage for my alternative
solution to the problem, developed in Chapter 4.6
Indeterminacy of Meaning
A fundamental source of indeterminacy of meaning is lack of specific knowledge of context. There are a variety of aspects of the context of an utterance
that can create indeterminacy of meaning. I examine several here:
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A. Zigong wanted to dispense with the raw sheep for the prayer
ceremony on the first day of each moon. The Master said:
Ci, you grudge your sheep; I grudge my rituals.
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you are loath to part with the price of the sheep, but I am
loath to see the disappearance of the rite.7
Other translators follow these two patterns. Huang translates the character (yang) in A as sheep, and Lau translates it in B as price of the
sheep. These are not just problems of translation of the sort that arise as
in example D above with the Chinese students, where the one word has no
exact equivalent in English, and so the best choice we picked was misleading. Also, for this example, our translator is familiar with the Chinese as
well as the English language. The problem demonstrates one of the ways
in which knowledge and emphasis of context can affect a persons understanding of meaning.
Huang translates the sentence about the sheep literally and does not
understand or give any weight to context. In contrast, context influences
Laus translation, which refers to the price of the sheep when no word
for price can be found in the original sentence. Instead of ignoring context
and translating (yang) as sheep, Lau understands that Zigong functions
as an administrator in charge of rituals, including the budget for them.
Knowing this context by itself will not necessarily affect an interpreters
understanding of the meaning of the sentence. The interpreter must also
think that this fact is of central importance to what Confucius means,
enough to justify a change of understanding of the meaning of the sentence
and the addition of price in the translation.
This change in translation is significant. The literal translation, without
the emphasis on the context of Zigongs budget responsibilities, causes us
to think that the issue here is the life of the sheep, not the issue of saving
money. The issue of the relation of frugality to proper observance of ritual
is, however, an important issue in the rest of the Analects. Without this
knowledge, we would miss a chance to make this important connection. If
we were to follow Huangs literal translation, we might interpret Zigongs
attitude as stemming from sympathy for the sheep instead of trying to be
frugal. Here, as usual, meaning depends on context. We also encounter
other types of ambiguity in the Analects.
Disagreements about how to translate Analects 1.2 and 4.6 are dependent on grammatical ambiguities, along with theoretical disagreement over
what the characters (ren) mean. Consider 1.2.
. . . .
. . . . .
.
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1. Filial piety and fraternal submission! Are they not the root
of all benevolent actions ()?12 (Legge)
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3. Filiality and fraternity are () the basis of ren (), are they
not?14 (Brooks and Brooks)
4. Might we not say that filial piety and respect for elders
constitute () the root of Goodness ()? (Slingerland)15
At the most general level, Makeham is claiming that lack of knowledge of historical context makes for ambiguity, and because we do not
have sufficient historical knowledge to resolve these ambiguities, we tend to
rely on arbitrary scriptural or normative readings of the text, which do
not include needed historical information. This leads Makeham to declare
that we are not able to know the meaning[s] of the sentences of the Analects. Both Makeham and Gardner use the basic condition of ambiguity to
examine the relation of the commentarial tradition to the original Analects.
Whereas Makeham is struck by the way that ambiguity undermines our
knowledge of the meaning of the text, Gardner is impressed by the way in
which ambiguity makes for a multiplicity of interpretations. On that basis,
Gardner claims that the Analects lacks meaning of its own.16 But whether
these accounts are ultimately plausible will depend on the success of the
two philosophers arguments for these conclusions. In the next section, I
will examine in detail Gardners argument for semantic nihilism, the view
that the multiplicity of interpretations of the Analects shows that the text
lacks meaning of its own.
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the recognition of the historicity of all knowledge led to the recognition that
there is no objective historical cognition but that all historical knowledge
is relative to the standpoint of the historian.19 Developing this historicist
theme, Gardner says:
English translations of the Confucian classics have tended to
present what we might call a normative reading, the aim of
which is to present the true meaning of a text, at least as the
translators apprehend it. As a result readers are easily left with
the impression that the translation in hand is the way a classic is to be understood, the only legitimate or meaningful way
the text can be read. Let me say, of course, that this sort of
normative reading has an important place, that translators have
every right to attempt to uncover what, for them, is the true
meaning of these sacred works from the Chinese tradition. But,
at the same time, translations presenting normative readings can
be historically misleading, for they obscure the simple fact that
the Confucian classics were not static, that they held different
meaning for different people in the Confucian tradition over
the course of centuries. Historically sensitive renderings of the
classics, which underscore the changing meaning of the texts
over time, place, and person, are needed to complement the
normative readings; these translations will more fully and vividly
reflect the role of the classics in the historical development of
the Confucian tradition.20
Gardner does not present an argument for his view that Confucian
classics lack true meaning in and of themselves, but he does state it clearly.
Without some argumentation, however, and without a successful response
to an obvious criticism of his view, this approach cannot stand without a
great deal of qualification. The most straightforward argument, seemingly
implicit in his account, surely is unsound. For his argument seems to be that
because over time there have been multiple interpretations of the Analects,
there is no universal significance to the text. But we know that this argument is invalid, in much the same way that the corresponding argument
that there are no universal ethical truths is invalid. It does not follow that
because people have disagreed about some historical fact or interpretation
related to an ethical truth or a scientific proof, that there is no fact of the
matter. People have disagreed about whether the earth is the center of the
universe, but that does not mean that there are no facts of the matter.
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cally earlier form of Chinese than the rest of the text and that they arguably were written at the time of Confuciuss death as a memorial to him.
Specific dating of this sort tends at best to be speculative, but this sort of
argument is vitiated more importantly by chain of evidence considerations
that weaken it considerably. According to scholar, translator D. C. Lau,
although there is evidence from a quote in Liji of the pre-Han dynasty
book titled Analects,28 beyond that single reference nothing more is known
about the book from early sources. The earliest detailed information about
the text derives from the first-century AD bibliographical chapter in Han
Shu, History of the Han Dynasty by Pan Ku.29
More recent archaeological finds have offered Han Dynasty versions of
Analects, but this does not change the fact that even with these early texts,
we lack any certain account of the origin of these texts. Pushing back the
dates of the texts does not resolve the chain of evidence problem by itself.30
Although we are talking about historical evidence in this case, we
might wish to consider the strength of historical evidence using the analogy of evidence in legal cases. In legal arguments about evidence, it is
important to establish the chain of possession of evidence in a case. If that
chain is broken, it is possible to have a reasonable doubt that the evidence
is authentic. We may forever have this sort of problem when it comes to
making any claims about which parts of the Analects are original. One of
the versions of the Analects, reported in Han Shu, is the Gu Lun, reportedly
discovered in the walls of Confuciuss house.31 But how reliable is this
claim? Whats more, even if it was discovered in the walls of Confuciuss
house, what would that show about the time the text was composed and
how accurately it represents the sayings of Confucius? With no continuous
verifiable chain of evidence from the time of Confucius to the writing of
the text, we have reason to doubt its authenticity. Even if there were a clear
chain of evidence, that fact would not necessarily show that the representations of Confuciuss speech were accurate. Even if the text were written at
the time that Confucius was alive, which no one suggests, we would still
not know whether the transcribed sayings were trustworthy portrayals of
Confuciuss speech. It seems possible that the representations first were part
of an oral tradition and only later written down, like Homers epic poems.
Even if that were so, there is no reason to think that the oral tradition did
not alter the sayings through the transmission process.32
Perhaps if the state of the Analects and the various versions available
pointed to the existence of some reliable chains of evidence and some reliable
indicators that these texts were accurate accounts of Confuciuss speech, we
could draw some reasonably well-supported inferences about what Confu-
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ciuss exact views were. However, the state of the historical evidence makes
that impossible. This result leaves us either crippled when it comes to making authoritative claims about Confuciuss views or casting about for some
other, nonhistorical, or at least not exclusively historical, approach to the
text. Creel attempts to address this problem by arguing that the historical
authenticity of the Analects is reflected in its realistic portrayal of Confucius. If that were true, it would vitiate the lack of a chain of evidence
problem. I turn to this question: How far does the realistic portrayal of
Confucius support the claim that he actually said or must have said much
of what was attributed to him in the Analects?
Creels account may seem dated, and some may wonder why I have
not selected more recent scholarly treatments of Confuciuss life. I decided
to focus on Creels account because many accounts seem to gloss over this
historical problem. They bring the assumption to their work that some elements of the traditional picture of Confuciuss life must be true. In contrast,
Creel feels a need to offer a defense of his approach, and I suspect that
his mode of defense and the leap of faith it is bound up with represent
a version of what any contemporary biographer presupposes. So I turn to
his account because of its clarity regarding what appear to be examples of
background thinking in others accounts.33
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It is hard to see how each of these three claims can be maintained. For
Kants account of a community based on respect cannot, without distorting
that account, be divorced from his epistemology or metaphysics.
Even if Creels account of Confucius as philosopher were acceptable,
his account would run into one additional significant problem, the quest for
the historical Confucius. Although there might be some initial plausibility
of treating earlier texts in the Confucian tradition as reliable indicators of
what Confucius really said and taught, Creel does not try to show that there
is any way to know that the Analects material is accurate. Instead, as many
thinkers have, he assumes that earlier sources are more accurate than later
sources, but he never shows why this should be so. It is possible both types
of sources are unreliable. We have no reliable evidence about the genesis of
the Analects sayings, nor do we have significant, independent, corroborating evidence recorded earlier. These deficiencies are enough to refute Creels
view. His alternative tactic, however, is to argue that the accuracy of the
Analects sentences comes through in the ways they successfully portray a
person who seems real, not idealized. But real has two different meanings.
A realistic portrayal is one that rings true. I can read a realistic novel,
but that does not mean the plot reveals what actually happened or that the
characters depict real people. Literature provides a clear reason for thinking
that we cannot use realistic portrayals as evidence of truth of the portrayal.
Despite Creels attempt to offer an argument for the historical truth of the
Analects account of Confucius, his arguments are not successful.
In response to this argument, defenders of Creels general approach
might want to claim that we still have enough evidence from the Analects
to take the account of Confucius there to be partly correct. Indeed, I suspect that many scholars are influenced enough by the realistic portrayal of
Confucius in the Analects to think that it must be at least partly true. This
approach, nevertheless, is usually not offered as an argument, as it is more
like wishful thinking. Michael Nylan, in her wonderful book, The Five Confucian Classics, with great care surveys the limits of the historical evidence
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for early Confucian texts, but when she characterizes the Confucius of the
Analects, she describes the portrayal of him as semifictional.47 However,
even from her careful account, it is not clear which parts are fictional and
which parts are not. Are the nonfiction parts those that claim there was a
man named Confucius, born at a certain time, who later taught students?
Do nonfiction parts include certain utterances he made? The term semifictional might be justifiable if we could pin down a way to distinguish
the nonfictional parts from the fictional parts of the sayings.
Even if one grants the various points I have been making against the
historical evidence regarding the identities of the author or authors of the
Analects and whether Confucius said any of the sentences attributed to him
in the Analects, I would argue that the lack of a sufficient historical record
makes those meanings all the more accessible. Based on what we have reason to believe about the genesis of the Analectsthat it was written over
time by several authors offering competing accounts of Confuciuss teachingit is reasonable to treat the Analects as akin to a philosophical novel:
it invokes an imaginative world with decipherable meanings within the
limits of our understanding of that world, even if our historical knowledge
of the circumstances of Confuciuss discussions with his interlocutors or the
circumstances of the authorship of the Analects are incomplete. However, in
order to make this case, we need to clarify what sort of character Confucius
reflects in the Analects and what makes him seem so real. I suggest that
this view, rather than making knowledge of the meanings of the Analects
sentences inaccessible, allows the sayings of Confucius to become even more
accessible. Although I will not pursue this argument here, these same general
points could be made about Confuciuss interlocutors, who, like Confucius,
function as characters within the various truncated stories that make up a
large portion of the Analects.48
We can think of the Analects as a philosophical novel with Confucius
as the main character. We might proceed in much the same way if we were
to become convinced that Socrates never had the sorts of conversations that
Plato attributes to him. We could, nevertheless, read the early Socratic dialogues as fictional text with philosophical points. The philosophical points
of those early dialogues are independent of any historical claims about
their accuracy as depictions of Socrates actual conversations. Whats more,
their historical influence is such that even if we were to find evidence that
some of these dialogues represented the speech of a drunken aristocrat who
definitely was not Socrates, a brilliant fellow who occasionally showed up in
the agora and challenged politicians to defend their views, it is not likely
that we would change the name of the main character of those texts. They
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have a literary and philosophical life of their own, and Socrates is the character represented in those dialogues even if he never, in fact, had some or
any of those conversations. Not only does Socrates have a life of his own
as a character, his character also represents a set of attitudes and practices
of critical reflection, which have influenced the subsequent development
of Western philosophy and, arguably, continue to provide a substantially
correct account and practice of the central aspects of critical reflection.49
Thus, I argue that although it might be disturbing to discover that Socrates
was not represented correctly in these dialogues, that knowledge would
not undermine the importance of these texts or our ability to grasp their
sentences meanings.50
Even if we distinguish between Confucius as the main character of the
Analects and the historical Confucius, we are left with additional puzzles.
For example, we typically think of novels, with main characters and plot
lines, as having some unity. The unity might be narrative: the novelist tells
a single story about a main character, such as Elizabeth Bennett in Jane
Austins Pride and Prejudice or Stephen Blackpool in Charles Dickenss Hard
Times. This model does not work perfectly if we are thinking of classical
novels with traditional narrative structures because what we have in the
Analects is a set of conversational episodes, with some of the conversations
apparently contradicting other conversations. Lacking this sort of narrative
unity, we might attribute to the text the unity of the writing of a single
author, whose authorship provides a unity for what otherwise might appear
to be disconnected fragments. My model here is T. S. Eliots great poem,
The Wasteland, which is intentionally fragmented yet, nonetheless, retains
the unity of being the writing of a single author with identifiable themes
throughout the work. In this long poem, the main character can be seen
as the author, who is revealed indirectly through the lines. He expresses his
vision about various conflicts and tensions he finds in his own beliefs or in
the beliefs of his contemporaries.
This model, however, will not work, given what we have reason to
believe about the Analects, that it was written over a period of time, probably
by various authors, some of whom might have been recording oral tradition,
some adding their own sentences, and some compiling and correcting others sentences. Recognizing multiple authors helps make sense out of some
of the conflicting claims we find in the Analects. For example, one of the
most discussed and used characters in the text is (ren), but passage 9.1
says that the Master rarely discussed ren): , , , .51
But we know Confucius often discusses (ren). How are we to make
sense of this obvious contradiction? One way would be to recognize that
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there were two ways of thinking about the relation of (ren) to (li) in
Confuciuss teaching. Some of the group of authors played up a relationship
between (ren) and (li), while others attempted to present an account
of Confuciuss teaching that gave little weight to (ren). This possibility
gains further weight if we can demonstrate the phenomenon of competing
accounts of Confuciuss teaching.52
In a different text from the one already under discussion, Makeham
argues that in the context of the formation of the texts that talk about
Confucius, various understandings of his teaching were being offered and
that Ru was understood as a family resemblance concept,53 covering a variety of different teachings whose authors pressed their own views of the
significance of Confuciuss teaching by constructing and circulating their
contributions to the Confucius legend.54 If Makeham is right, what these
different authors had in common was the recognition that Confucius was
an important figure and that it mattered how he and his views were to
be understood. They may also have believed that he was a person of high
moral and intellectual achievement. Although in some cases they may have
thought their views would be taken more seriously if put in the mouth
of Confucius, in other cases they may have thought that the views they
attributed to him accurately depicted what it means to be a person of high
moral and intellectual achievement. So they may have believed that their
attributions were in some sense true, even if the specific details of the dialogue were false. They may have believed that their contributions described
important behaviors/considerations that a person such as Confucius would
have accepted as correct. What this approach suggests is that we should
understand the Analects as the beginning stages of what later became a fullblown commentarial tradition. The difference between this early stage of
proto-commentary and the later stage of full-blown commentary in which
the standard text, or texts of the Analects, were already established, is that
the commentators were anonymous, and their commentarial function was
one aspect of being a contributor to the text. If Makeham is right, and
I am inclined to think that he is, we would have to include some of the
authors of Zhuangzi as contributors to these proto-commentaries.
If this rough story about the authorship of the Analects is correct,
then it would give weight to a project of understanding the text in terms
of the versions of Confuciuss teaching that arise there, their relations to
one another, and the question of which ones represent the best versions of
Confuciuss teachings. Note that this question differs from the question of
which version best represents Confuciuss views, for on this account, we
are compelled to drop the pretense of knowing for sure from our read-
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ing of the Analects what Confuciuss real historical teachings are. In this
project, we later interpreters are continuing the very early efforts, linking
ourselves to those contributors to the Analects who lived generations apart
from Confucius, to ask, Is this the best version of his view? Here we are,
on philosophical grounds, using the fragments of the Analects as a starting
point. What threads of teaching can be identified in the text? Which threads
of the text represent the highest version of the teachings therein? Which
conflicts of view ought to be seen as central to this range of views in this
text? Which version of Confuciuss teaching should be rejected as inferior?
Which version accepted as superior?
Suppose, then, that we operate by treating Confucius as a range of
multiple characters in a single text written by various authors trying to influence how Confuciuss teachings are to be understood. Would this approach
and its related acknowledgment of indeterminacy undermine our attempts
to understand meanings in terms of speaker or authorial intention? It would
if we need to know specific information about the authors in order to grasp
their meanings and intentions. But suppose that we accept that Confucius is
a set of characters or different versions of the same character, whose sayings
were possibly produced by multiple authors? The multiplicity of authors
creates a problem only if knowing their specific identities and intentions
is required to understand the meanings of the Confucius characters utterances. We know that we can read a novel and discern the meanings of a
characters words and actions even though the character is fictional. We can
do that because the novel evokes a world and set of contexts sufficient for
us to discern speakers meanings and intentions.
I would contend that the problem Makeham poses of historical indeterminacy, does not, as he despairs, contribute to the problem of indeterminacy of meaning. Instead, the Analects historical indeterminacy makes
its sentences meanings even more accessible than they would be on the
historical model of authorial intention. Consider, for example, the appeal
Makeham makes to Roland Barthes:
It is not that the Author may not come back in the Text, in
his text, but he then does so as a guest. If he is a novelist,
he is inscribed in the novel like one of his characters, figured
in the carpet; no longer privileged, paternal, aletheological, his
inscription is ludic. He becomes, as it were, a paper-author: his
life is no longer the origin of his fictions, but a fiction contributing to his work.55
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important feature of textual interpretation: the use of the principle of charity. In fact, all interpretation has an essential scriptural aspect, which is not
just existential or subjective. It will be my task to show this by appeal to
strategies of clarification of what meaning is, derived from Wittgensteins
later philosophy and from the work of Donald Davidson. In contrast with
Makeham, I hold that history poses the problem of indeterminacy of meaning, but even the most comprehensive knowledge of history cannot solve
this problem. In the next chapter, I offer an account of understanding texts
that shows under what conditions textual understanding is possible.
Introduction
In this chapter, I sketch a Wittgensteinian account of meaning and argue
that this account finds no place for the distinction between historical and
normative meaning. All meaning is in some sense normative. In Chapter 3,
I concluded by arguing that whereas history poses a problem for us of how
to understand texts from a distance, history cannot solve the problem. Once
the problem of discerning meaning from a historical distance is made salient,
appeals to history alone, the source of the problem in the first place, can
provide no solution. What is involved in understanding texts created 2,500
years ago? To develop an account of understanding texts from a historical
distance, I take up arguments from Donald Davidson and Wittgenstein.
My argument proceeds as follows: In the first section of this chapter,
I use resources in Wittgensteins later philosophy to present critiques of
Makehams and Gardners views on the problems encountered when trying
to interpret the meaning of classical Chinese texts. I argue that Wittgensteins appeal to meaning, as to how words are used in a language-game,
provides an alternative to Makehams and Gardners problematic accounts. In
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need to develop basic reading skills among themselves that are specific to the
texts they take up. In the abstract, it might seem that the numerous members of the community of Analects readers would be completely hampered
by their differences in historical time, language, and culture. Yet we have
first-rate studies of the semantics of early Chinese. We also have some basic
information about the practices of writing in early China and the development of communities of scholars, which were the natural homes for writers
of early texts.8 What is crucial in this context, however, is a key principle
of interpretation and understanding, one that Makehams and Gardners
accounts do not do justice to and that is implicit in my Wittgensteinian
accountthe principle of interpretive charity.
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any way he can discover the speaker to be largely wrong about the world.
For he [the interpreter] interprets sentences [as] held true...according
to the events and objects in the outside world that cause the sentences to
be held true.18 Davidsons view of interpretation is meant to show that
there is a necessary relationship between interpretation (understanding) and
ascribing true beliefs. Given Davidsons view of charity, it is not possible
to have succeeded in interpreting a speaker without doing so charitably,
without seeing the speaker as having largely true, logically coherent beliefs
and accurate observations about the world. We can capture the logic of
his point by saying that charitable interpretation, in his sense, constitutes
understanding. So to fail to interpret charitably is to fail to understand the
speaker and, thus, to have failed to interpret the speaker.
Nonetheless, within this fundamental constraint on interpretation,
there might still be some room for differences in interpretation. For example, consider Davidsons third category from the list given above, which I
will call the great middle ground of our sentences. Davidson says that
whereas W. V. O. Quine allows that sentences not describing immediate
goings-on in the environment can be interpreted at will, he wishes to
extend the principle of charity to these sentences as well and so to preserve truth even of these sentences. Davidson says, [I]t makes for mutual
understanding, and hence for better understanding, [my emphasis] to interpret what the speaker accepts as true when we can.19 But this extension
of the principle of charity puts Davidson on different ground in his basic
explanation and defense of charity. For whereas the first two aspects of
charity concern what makes interpretation and understanding possible at
all, this extension is justified in terms of what would make for better
mutual understanding.
If we follow Davidsons three-way distinction between parts of language in which charity is required for interpretation, we might draw the following conclusions when thinking about interpretation of classical Chinese
texts: We will need to suppose in our interpretations of classical Chinese
texts at least some basic forms of inference. So, if we decide that (shu)
means Book of History, we can also expect that it contains accounts of events
from the past, that it was written, that it may or may not be accurate, and
so on. We can also expect that in translations of sentences about perceivable,
changeable circumstances, for example, descriptions of a butcher gracefully
carving an ox, we will be able associate our sentences with the Chinese
sentences readily enough. (We will need to know something of the history
of Chinese butchering, however, to check for differences in tools, methods,
etc.) It seems to me that the greatest difficulties will come in Davidsons
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middle range, those sentences that do not directly express logical inferences
or do not directly describe the environment.
When we look again at Makehams example from Analects 1.2, we
confront ambiguity in the Chinese text concerning the character (wei),
as well as questions of how to understand (ren), translated variously
as morality, benevolence, good, virtue, kindness, humanity, authoritative
personhood, and so forth. In this part of language, Davidson says, there is
a real danger of papering over conceptual differences if we take charitable
interpretation to be required to maximize understanding.20 For example, if
we take Analects 1.2 (.. Filial piety constitutes the
basis of morality.) as a sentence we would hold true, those of us who are
liberal Westerners might have a hard time affirming this sentence as true,
and the sentences we might want to affirm in its place, for example
Freedom as long as we dont harm others is the basis of moralitywould
certainly not get the meaning right. My own understanding of the sentence
is this: Filial piety, that is, behaving in a way respectful toward ones parents
in accordance with ritual propriety, is the basis in the family for generally
knowing how to do what is morally required to maintain proper relationships. But even with this interpretation, which is close to saying that learning etiquette and practicing it in the family is the basis for learning how
conduct oneself morally in all of ones relations with others, we tend to get
a sentence many of us would consider false. It is clear that to translate this
vast middle ground of sentences, we need something different from agreement about what constitutes truth if we are to get proper interpretation.
Davidsons suggestion, that we look for explicable error, will not work
either. This suggestion, which undergoes refinement in his later discussions
of passing theories (as theories designed to explain the present utterance
of a person in context), appears to take up or at least be similar to Richard
Grandys development of the principle of humanity as an alternative to
Quines principle of charity. Grandy argues that Quines principle of charity
when strictly appliedQuine argues that we interpreters assign our own
sentences we hold true to the speakers held true sentenceswill sometimes produce bad translations. In some cases, Grandy argues, we do well
to impute beliefs and desires as similar to our own as possible, but that
will require in some cases opting for intelligible falsehoods over mysterious
truths. It is crucial, Grandy claims, to take into consideration the past history of the speaker and to understand the conditions of life in that culture
and time period that would be obvious to the speaker. Only with historical knowledge can we assume that what is obvious to us in the speakers
sentences was also obvious to the speaker. He gives the example of a person
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who has recently proved true a theorem that he and others earlier thought
was false. If the theorem prover asks another person about the theorem and
the other person says it is false, this is an explainable falsehood. Grandy
also offers cases of observation sentences, for which attributing explicable
falsehood makes more sense than attributing mysterious truth.21 Although
Grandy discusses a range of examples, including one archeological example,
all of his examples that depart from Quines principle of charity are ones
in which Grandy wants to attribute to others explicable error(s). That is,
they are cases where the interpreter takes a speakers truth as obvious, but
the interpreter uses that obvious truth to attribute explicable falsehood to
the speakers sentences.
But what of situations, such as in comparative philosophy, where
study of an alternative culture and its approach to and reflection on ethics
undermine ones settled sense of what is obvious? What about those cases
that require people to set aside their own beliefs and to imagine an alternative form of life and language-games in order to understand them? In such
cases, a principle of charity might then require the interpreter not to seek
agreement between his own beliefs and those of the alternative form of life,
as Quines principle of charity has it, nor would the interpreter need to
offer explicable error, as Grandys principle of humanity requires; instead, the
interpreter would be required to master new language-games to understand
the alternative form of lifes truths and insights.
The difficulty of settling on a correct translation of Analects 1.2 points
to the difficulty of finding sentences in English that do the same work
(convey exactly the same meanings) as the sentences in Chinese do. This
difficulty is evidence that charitable interpretation is not simply one thing
but is a family of requirements for understanding. Whereas the intelligibility
of anothers speech requires attributing some relatively logical inferences to
him of the sort we ourselves recognize as apt and recognizing the same range
of relatively obvious perceptual objects we recognize in the same contexts,
charitable understanding of the middle ground of uttered sentences leaves
aside such obvious truths and falsehoods in seeking intelligibility.
In the following section, I propose two requirements for a charitable
understanding of this middle ground of language of classical Chinese texts:
For example, Confuciuss sentence about (ren) might fit better into what
we would call the language-game of pedagogy or child rearing than into
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the language of theories about ethics or human nature. Moreover, his style
of discourse may correlate better with that of psychological therapy than
psychological or philosophical theory. His recommendations about (ren)
may correlate better with our ordinary discourse about how to manage
relationships than with our philosophical discourse about whether virtue
or duty is more fundamental as a moral standard.
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may be no more than similar to our own. What role would this approach
have in translating classical Chinese texts into English?
This principle would require that we locate in the imagined world of
the Analects the various common forms of behavior exhibited in that world
and use that as a starting point for understanding the language of the text.
It would, for example, be important to determine in what ways Confuciuss
behaviors toward his interlocutors exhibit raising questions, making suggestions to them, making criticisms of them, forming hypotheses, giving
arguments, constructing definitions, clarifying moral ideals, and so on. We
need to locate his sentences within the common behavior of mankind while
recognizing that behaviors we categorize as criticisms, clarifying moral ideals,
etc., represent no single thing but a family of more or less similar behaviors.
Moreover, we need to find rough correlates between terms he uses and our
own terms so that we can be clear, for example, in interpreting his suggestions as to what he is asking his interlocutor to do. But in doing so, we
need to be sensitive to both similarities and differences.
Following Wittgensteins approach, we maximize our understanding of
the language and practices of unfamiliar cultures by finding corresponding
similar practices and language of our own to serve as a basis of understanding
and translation. For example, we might want to translate (li) as etiquette.
But if we do so, we miss the importance (li) has for Confucius and other
teachers of tradition (Ru). In fact, Confuciuss teachings might seem
plainly crazy if we identify li with etiquette books that were common in
the United States in the mid-twentieth century. So translated, we might end
up ascribing to him sentences such as, Etiquette is central to the whole of
morality, which seem to most of us plainly false. Here we have an anomaly.
So the challenge is to figure out, given what he says about (li), what the
concept corresponds to for us. We might want to start with forms of behavior
showing respect for people in roles of legitimate power and authority over us.
Consider the behavior we teach and expect of children toward such people,
for example, their teachers, coaches, priests, rabbis, or ministers. Other things
being equal, we expect children to obey such people, thank them for help,
act politely toward them, etc., as signs of respect for someone in such a role.
This correspondence gives us a handle on how to understand (li) in some
contexts and possibly how best to translate the term.
A second set of translation issues arises when we examine Confuciuss
discourse with others. There is a set of what look like Socratic questions
that introduce various passages in the Analects: (huo wen ren). We
might translate this as Someone asked, What is (ren)? We might think
that this is a request for a definition of the concept of (ren). But if we
understand the question in this way, we end up with various conundrums.
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There are very few, if any, answers to these sorts of questions that even
look like definitions. In this case, a fairly obvious translation, arising from
word-for-word dictionary correspondences produces a problem in how to
understand the text charitably. What else might the question mean?
We get a better understanding of the meaning of this sort of question if we understand the question to mean, Someone asked about how
he might behave to get closer to being (ren)? The argument I would
offer for this interpretation is that the answers that are typically given to
these sorts of questions appear to be answers to this question, not to the
Socratic request for a definition.
Based on these two examples alone, it is clear that we need to locate
the language of the Analects in its home language-games, its key terms,
and in terms and forms of discussion. If we follow these two suggestions,
how would this approach impact our interpretation of the Analects 1.2
(..)?
Basic Meaning
The virtues of respectful
filial and fraternal
love and respect
politeness within the
family (: filial piety,
devotion to ones living
and dead forbears)
(: fraternal love,
devotion to ones eldest
brother)
As for
As for N as such
Presumably, I suppose;
perhaps; apparently
constitute
count as N, be an N
practicing
Humane, complete moral
goodness, relationally
responsible
Humaneness, kindliness,
kind-heartedness;
benevolence, Goodness
as a moral value
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From this chart, it is easy to generate a range of possible interpretations of this sentence, using what Davidson calls our prior theory of
the meanings of these characters. The difficulty is to determine the most
reasonable passing theory, which attempts to settle on the most reasonable
interpretation of this sentence in context and what its author might have
meant by it. Beyond the ambiguity of the character (wei), the difficulty
of settling on the meanings of (ren) and (ben) also presents special
problems. For something to be basic or crucial is for it to be basic or crucial
in some respect relative to some specifiable goal. So being a male is crucial
for defining bachelor, and being male is a necessary condition of being
a bachelor. And exposing children to art at a young age is crucial for their
developing a refined artistic sensibility. How can we tell in this specific
context what (ben) means?
It will be important in resolving this question to clarify the context
of this statement as well as the enterprise/practice in which it is embedded. In short, using Wittgensteins term, we need to be able to determine
the language-game in which this statement plays a role. Is this statement
being used to analyze a concept, guide moral cultivation, present a theory
of moral development, or what?
Out of context, this statement could be used to do any of these
things. But there is little evidence that Confucius had much interest in
defining concepts. Moreover, although he does offer insights about stages of
moral development and clarifies distinctions between exemplary and nonexemplary persons and conduct, these do not take on the form of theories
of moral development. For example, the clearest account of stages of moral
development can be found in his autobiographical comments about his
own development. And the clarity he offers about ren) often takes
the form of making specific comments about individual conduct, not the
development of general, systematic theories. Without offering any account
to back it up, Confucius appears to be a functioning moral and pedagogical particularist.
Reflection on dao, the way to conduct ones life, plays an important
role in Confuciuss project but only, as he himself indicates, in the context
of study and work to improve oneself in terms of dao-constituting norms
(Analects 2.15). If we take this key claim as a clue about the overall genre
of the text of the Analects, we might classify it as a combination of recommendations about how to improve oneself morally and reflections about
topics central to that enterprise.
In light of this characterization, how should we understand Analects
1.2? If we think of 1.2 as a reflection on or out of study designed to improve
oneself in terms of dao-constituting norms, then I suggest the following
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which both ought to express care and respect. Children grow up learning how to navigate in this sort of social world and develop a sense of
self and responsibility that fits this set of cultural arrangements. The ideals
and concepts that undergird this set of arrangementstradition, authority, respect, reciprocity, and responsibilityare all ideals that contemporary
North Americans, for example, recognize. So we can readily understand this
rather different set of norms in general terms familiar to us, and we can
even affirm these Zhou (or Han) ideals in their most general forms, but
the specific cultural practices and related normative statements articulating
them, such as Analects 1.2, would be hard for us to hold true.
Davidson might challenge my argument by claiming that even I would
have to admit that Zhou Dynasty thinkers and I would have to agree about a
great deal for me to be able to locate our normative disagreements. Although
I dont disagree with this claimin fact, it is encoded in the Wittgensteinian view about the possibility of translation of the language of a foreign,
strange culture into our ownI would argue that the intelligibility of the
details of the language of that culture depends on our familiarity, imagined
or real, with the forms of life in which these sentences are embedded. Even
if that familiarity is connected to being able to associate Analects 1.2 with
some very general sentences that we North Americans hold true (respect for
parents is good, responsibility is good, mutual benefit is good, etc.), what
is at stake in our understanding Analects 1.2 is not just these general claims
on which we easily agree.
So the problem of understanding Analects 1.2 is not to associate Confuciuss statements with statements we personally hold true in the twenty-first
century or to explain his errors but to clarify the Confucian form of life. We
understand Confucian life by understanding how Zhou ritual practice is connected to filial love and respect, how the rituals and feelings together serve as
the basis for and model of good conduct in general, and how people would
act and understand themselves and their relations to others in this form of
life. That understanding requires that we hold as true some sentences that
Confucius holds as true, butand it is here that Davidson goes wrongit
also requires making Confuciuss language and related practices an imaginable
option for us, mastered in imagination if not in reality. That is, we need to
be able to make sense of how someone, engaged in relevant Confucian, but
foreign (to us) practices, would use these sentences and how he would hold
them to be true. Otherwise, we cannot understand them.
Supposing that my accounts of the meaning and intelligibility of Analects 1.2 and other such Analects sentences are correct, then we would have to
conclude thatpace Davidsoninterpreting these sentences does not simply
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require associating our held true sentences with Confuciuss held true sentences
or explaining his errors. Instead, by locating the place of those sentences in
a set of practices different from our own, made understandable in terms of
both their similarities and differences from our own linguistic practices, we
need to learn how to use and affirm as viable in that culture some sentences
that we are personally and in our own culture inclined to hold as false.30
We do not need to require holding these foreign language-game
sentences to be true to our own values in order to understand them. We
simply need to be able to imagine how we and others engaged in that
language-game could hold them to be true in a language-game similar to,
but different from, our own.
Following this analysis of what it takes to understand Analects 1.2, we
must infer that the principle of charity requires that for this and the rest
of Davidsons so-called middle ground of sentences, we locate those claims
in the language-games where those sentences get their meaning, understand
the general claims we and practitioners of those language-games both hold
true, master the foreign language-games, and imagine how we could hold
true those middle ground sentences in light of that mastery, despite our
inclination to hold them false.
Even if we find a charitable interpretation of our middle ground
sentences, like Analects 1.2, when we use this language-game approach, we
will, however, not have resolved all of the potential ambiguities facing us.
For example, locating the language-games, in terms of which , , and
get their meaning, does not resolve the question of the meaning of the
character (wei). I will next focus on the relation of the requirements
of interpretive charity to this character (wei), which means either to
be or to do.
In my example of the builders language-game, I argued that a person
should follow and act on the interpretation that, in that language-game,
makes best sense of his foremans behavior. I argued that, in this context, this
is simply to interpret charitably. But in addition, this interpretive principle
is a commonplace in textual interpretation, that a charitable interpretation
of a text is better than one that is not charitable. The principle of charity requires that, other things being equal, in the face of well-supported
interpretations, the interpreter should adopt the one that will maximize the
sense and reasonableness of the text. That does not mean that the interpreter
should override well-defended interpretations to make the sentences in the
text true or reasonable no matter what. Instead, it means attributing those
views to the text that, consistent with possible defensible interpretations,
make those views the most reasonable of the possible alternatives. Here I
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assume that words in the text (with their cultural associations) provide the
most basic evidence for a correct interpretation. That is, the definitions
of a texts words, even when they include the correct anthropological and
historical associations, do not provide sufficient evidence to prove that we
know for sure what the speakers or authors intended meanings were. Yet,
it is precisely because of this under-determination of interpretation of text
that it is both possible and necessary to invoke the principle of charity.
That is, only when two competing interpretations are supported by the text
(and other relevant evidence) can the principle of charity be invoked. For
example, consider once again three possible interpretations of Analects 1.2:
. .
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claims on us, i.e., insights that we might not yet understand about how
life can be lived better.
Charitable interpretation primarily plays a role in texts for which an
authors or interpreters statements cannot be immediately understood, but
the author or interpreter is not available or willing to explain the texts
intended meanings. When the speaker can explain his meanings, interpretation is not needed. According to Ian Hackings view of interpretation,
which is meant to capture ordinary language usage, interpretation of a
sentence is required only when the hearer lacks immediate understanding,
and interpretation is not required if the speakers explanation is forthcoming and successful.31 When a speaker offers a successful explanation, there
is no need for interpretation. We typically accept the speakers explanation
unless the explanation itself is not understandable or is in conflict with other
things the person has said, either in general or concerning the statements
in need of explanation.
When the speaker of a statement is not available and the statement is not immediately understood, we must interpret it to understand
it. Although the speakers explanation is presumed to be correct, someone
elses interpretation of it does not have the same presumption. This gives
rise to the need to evaluate alternative interpretations. Of those interpretations that are consistent with (1) the text and (2) other relevant historical
evidence, including (3) the relevant language-games, the interpreter and his
audience must select an interpretation that can, as far as possible, take the
place of the speakers explanation. Typically, this will be the most charitable
interpretation, in the sense of being the interpretation that a defender of the
statement would offer as the best way to defend the position from actual
or possible criticisms.
Because we often treat a charitable interpretation as standing in for the
absent speakers explanation of meaning, we often speak of the charitable
interpretation as the speakers meaning. We presume that if the speaker were
available, the person would, as far as possible, offer the most defensible, that
is, most charitable explanation of the original meanings of sentences. So
we can treat the interpreters charitable interpretation as standing in for the
speakers explanation. In fact, the interpreters ability to present the position
charitably gives him the authority to speak for the author, with the right to
claim that his interpretation, while merely possible given the linguistic and
historical evidence, nevertheless succeeds in capturing the authors meaning.
What interpretive charity aims at is making sense of texts speech, as
written by authors and spoken by speakers. For example, we want to make
sense of the Analects, its teachings, and of Confucius, its main character. If
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Conclusion
Even though I have argued that the historical record of Confuciuss teachings
is too weak to support claims that passages in the Analects represent his actual
speech and teaching, there are two key features of this approach that should be
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Unless we give, beyond the sort of historical evidence that leaves the
meaning underdetermined, a successful philosophical defense of our selection, we will have fallen into the mere subjectively selected readers responses
that Gardner embraces and Makeham is worried about. And unless our
arguments are successful, our insistence on our preferred interpretation will
be arbitrary, and our Confucius would be a mere figure we use for our own
projections. But those responses would mean we were not taking Confucius
or the Analects seriously; instead, we would be engaging in a kind of intellectual self-indulgence. No serious follower of Confucius should welcome
this arbitrary approach, not only because of its failure to take Confucius
and the Analects seriously, but also because of the sort of small-mindedness
such an approach encourages by allowing interpreters to believe that beyond
their and others personal Confucius, there exists no real Confucius to teach
and challenge them. Even those interpreters who do not consider themselves
followers of Confucius must be open to the possibility that this character
Confucius and the Analects may make claims on them. If they admit this
much, they should welcome the best accounts of what this character has to
offer. Even if we reject Confuciuss teachings about how to lead our lives, we
need to have understood what his views are and what his sentences mean.
Understanding requires agreeing about what is obvious (logical inferences
and truths about perceptual beliefs), finding ones feet with a text or authors
language-games, putting those language-games into practice, and putting the
text in its best light in the face of possible criticisms. In this context, such
an understanding constitutes making the texts meaning clear.
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time
together of Bishop Berkeleys ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal.
I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is
impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which
Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large
stone, till he rebounded from itI refute it thus.
Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 248
Introduction
In Chapter 1, I have argued that Confuciuss thinking and practice as represented in the Analects offers a fundamental commitment to intervention
in the conduct and reflection of his interlocutors but little interest in theorizing about dao and its constitutive ideals and their epistemological and
metaphysical bases. He does, however, invoke these ideals in the course of
intervening in the behavior and reflection of his interlocutors. Recent commentators who have noticed this feature of Confuciuss practice have also,
problematically in my mind, tended to see him as not interested in truth
and have mistakenly associated this general view with later Wittgenstein.
This view, attributed to any thinkerthat by focusing on practice, we can
or should or have to jettison appeal to truthsuffers serious difficulties.
Although not every sentence we utter is a candidate for being true or false,
very many of them are. And even if some simple language-games do not
have devices and second-order semantic concepts for attributing truth to
their sentences, there are ways for truth to be affirmed. For example, even
in Wittgensteins simple builder language-game (discussed in Chapter 4),
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in the Analects. In this chapter, I argue against what is a contrasting, antimetaphysical interpretation. Both suffer from the same problem of distorting the text in the name of offering a version of the Analects that rests on
a philosophical theory that I view as problematic. In Chapter 4, I argued
that interpretation of the Analects depends on the principle of charity; this
view ultimately takes on the philosophical problem: Which of several possible, competing interpretations is more reasonable? Just as I find Zhu Xis
metaphysical interpretations of the Analects implausible, I find anti-realist
accounts of truth attributed to Confucius equally unreasonable. And because
I think that the Analects-type accounts of ethical cultivation do not require
either of these types of theories to make sense and are significantly better
off without them, I argue that neither of these accounts represents Confuciuss views.
But before I proceed to develop that argument in relation to these
anti-truth accounts of the Analects, I would like to develop a partial explanation of why this sort of anti-truth view can seem plausible. One line of
reasoning that can make this view seem plausible comes from the following
premises:
5. So, the best way to interpret Confucius (or any other early
Chinese thinker) is in terms of this anti-Western-metaphysics
worldview.
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gest that it was not salient at least in the type 4 way. But it may also be
that it is not salient in the type 1 way. For example, consider Analects 5.13.
. . . .
.
Zigong said: The cultural ornamentations (speech and conduct)
of the Master: they can be heard. As for our Masters words on
nature and the heavenly way, we cannot hear them.5
This passage, like others akin to it, such as Analects 9.1, 6.22, and 7.20,
causes interpretive problems. For example, we find a passage on the nature
of people (xing) at 17.2 and one on the Mandates of Heaven
(tianming) at 2.4. We are compelled to draw some plausible distinction to
try to make sense of 5.13. I am inclined to understand this passage as an
indicator, for the writer, of which topics were centrally important for Confuciuss project. The writer may or may not have been aware of the conflicting
passages, or he might have been aware of them but wanted to indicate their
lack of central importance. One way to do that was to indicate what sorts
of things Confucius communicated to those around him. Even though this
might seem descriptive, it can also be normative. Sentences like, Wise men
use words cautiously, even though descriptive in form indicate a norm.
Similarly, given Confuciuss role in early Chinese thought, especially for his
disciples, descriptive statements about what Confucius talked about would
likely be used to indicate a norm. But what would be behind it? We might
speculate that what is behind it is that discussion of these questions would
not further the central goals of his project, cultivation of a life lived out of
dao. And we get some confirmation of this approach from Analects 11.12:
. . . . . ..
. .
Zilu asked about spirits and gods. Our Master said, You havent
yet been able to appropriately serve human beings. How could
you be qualified to serve the ancestors spirits? Zilu further
asked, Dare I ask about the problem of death? Our Master
replied, You havent understood the problem of life, so how
can you understand death?
This passage might be read variously: as a critique of Zilu or as a more
general recommendation about what comes first and is, therefore, most
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tion. Munro is claiming that rarely have Chinese philosophers been interested in whether or not a proposition is true in the Greek sense. His
claim seems, then, related to another claim, which I discussed above and
rejected, that an interest in truth is conceptually connected to adopting a
particular metaphysical picture of the world. Munro seems to be claiming
that whoever does not accept that there is a timeless realm of perfect forms
necessarily ends up rejecting truth. His argument comes from the analogy
he sees between Zhuangzis view of the indeterminacy of truth and Platos
arguments that particulars are as much one way as their opposites. He does
not offer arguments for this claim but makes broad claims about differences
between Eastern and Western philosophies. He treats some of the icons of
Western philosophy, often Plato, as (a) representing the whole tradition
and (b) offering the sole possible philosophical orientation that takes truth
seriously. The fact that Chinese philosophers reject or do not appear to be
interested in Western metaphysics, specifically Platos, is, then, invoked as an
explanation for why they adopt the anti-truth, pragmatic views that they do.
Munro rightly offers no explicit appeal to the idea that early Chinese philosophers entertained Platos position and rejected it. But Munros
interpretive approach seems reasonable only if something like that were the
case. One can opt for the opposite approach to a given approach only if
the given approach is in ones awareness. So, these interpretive arguments
make the most sense if we treat Chinese philosophers as casting about for a
metaphysical view of the world: They see two possible views but reject one
and adopt the other because they dont see truth as an important goal. Or,
perhaps the relation goes the other way around: They dont see truth as an
important consideration because they have already adopted a metaphysics
that rejects truth or that finds no place for truth in it.
But I have already argued above that this did not happen. Confucius,
for example, did not anticipate the possibility of a Platonic or quasi-Platonic
metaphysics and reject it. So we are left to cast about for a more subtle
account. One possible approach is to frame this sort of account in terms
of an argument to find the best possible explanation. If the best explanation of why Confucius lacks a quasi-Platonic metaphysics is that he holds
an anti-Platonic view of metaphysics, then, on this basis, we must attribute
this belief to him, even if we have no direct evidence of him entertaining
and then rejecting this metaphysics.
The key assumption to this sort of reasoning, however, is that the
best way to explain central features of a Chinese philosophical view is to
attribute metaphysical principles that entail or require that view. What I
mean by this can be explained in terms of a modern correlate. One can
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Munro also overstates another difference when he states that for Plato,
a persons true bliss comes from contemplation of the Forms. And although
Plato does say that true pleasure derives from contemplation of the Forms,
he does so in the context of an argument designed to show that the overall
happiness of the soul requires that each of three parts, the rational, the
spirited, and the appetitive, must find its own pleasures. For Plato, there is
no such thing as a soul of a living human being that finds its bliss exclusively in contemplation.
Munros distinction between the Greek and early Chinese view of
mind and truth clearly rests on a caricature of Platos view. What about
Confuciuss view? I am reluctant to attribute a parallel philosophical view
of mind, belief, and truth, to Confucius. When Munro is attributing philosophical views to Confucius, he is often appealing to early Confucians in
general. And it is easier to find philosophical views about mind, human
nature, forms, and so on in post-Confucius Confucians. My point here is
that we need to exercise caution in attributing sweeping philosophical views
to Confucius based on the evidence that later Confucians held such views.
Once we assume that early Confucians, and maybe even early Chinese, all
have the same set of philosophical views or the same background worldview,
with implicit philosophical commitments, it is easy to find these philosophical views in Confuciuss teachings by reading them into the text, that is, by
question-begging, interpretive procedures.
But these general worries aside, it is clear that Confucius is not exclusively focused on changing behavior. Like Plato, he has some room for
reflection (si) in his project. Although it is not clear what is included
under this term, it seems reasonable to examine instances of Confuciuss
own reflections in the Analects in order to understand what they include.
His critique of various characterizations of (ren) that his interlocutors
offer would be one example. These almost always have the same form.
The interlocutor asks if some person is (ren). Confucius answers that
the person has some important, usually positive, quality, but then he asks
what this has to do with (ren). These instances of reflective exchange
rest on Confuciuss grasp that the ideal of (ren) requires proper conduct
and attitude over a lifetime without any failures. But Confucius presents
no detailed theory about (ren). Instead, he presses this sort of point
over and over. He seeks no final definition, however, and in that way his
project differs from Platos. He does, however, seek to help his interlocutor
overcome ethical confusion and change his behavior so that he will be able
to come closer to being (ren) in his everyday practice.
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beliefs that make no sense, this approach nips the bud in the wrong place.
For if Munro is right, Confucius accepts the beliefs he does only because of
their influence on behavior. But surely Confuciuss interest in conduct and
changes in conduct centers on his fundamental belief that some conduct is
closer to exhibiting (ren) than other conduct. And, I would argue, deciding which conduct is closer to ren and which is not must be understood
in terms of propositions that are held to be true.
The Analects contains such propositions such as 13.27: .
, Our Master said, Firm, resolute, honest, but dull are close to
(ren). If we take this claim and try to understand its meaning just in
terms of its consequences, those would be to get their audience to work to
develop these character traits and perhaps to get them to call these traits
nearly (ren). But this interpretation would not permit the audience to
believe that these character traits are closer to (ren) than their opposites.
Nevertheless, this statement means that these traits are close to the trait of
being (ren), and the statement practically encourages us for this reason to
develop these traits. If we reduce the meaning to encouraging us to develop
these traits without any further reason-supplying content for doing this, then
we end up with a behavioral account of the meaning of these utterances,
which fails to capture the way in which Confucius, even if in a very simple
way, is pointing to a normative relationship between the specified traits and
(ren). Although he neither defines (ren) nor presents a metaphysical
or epistemological account of our knowledge of it, we cannot assume that
Confucius is making a claim whose meaning can only be captured in terms
of an intended behavioral output. Munros view confuses a plain concern
with truth with a concern to develop a metaphysical or epistemological
account of truth or of our knowledge of truth.
A second, related feature of this mistake in reasoning is that it explains
a salient feature of Confuciuss method and focus, the concern with practice, in terms of essentialist, metaphysical commitments about the nature
of mind. It might make sense for a normal, Western philosophers views
to be explained in this way because such a philosophers focus and practice
might reasonably be expected to rest on some metaphysical, epistemological
commitments, which would serve to explain and justify them. Or at the
very least, we might want to press such a philosopher for the account that
his focus and practice presuppose and require to be defensible. And such
a philosopher would have to rise to that challenge. But an abnormal philosophers focus and practice need neither be explained nor even justified in
these ways. Munros account of early Confucians, like Confucius, treats them
commitments
as having abnormal commitments, while explaining those
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has his name (title of junzi) himself, he can certainly give orders.
When he issues orders himself, they will certainly be fulfillable.
Toward his orders issued, a junzi has nowhere to be casual.
This passage consists of a sorites argument, a multi-premise syllogism. This
sort of argument is no doubt from a later period in the composition of
the content of the text. The known earlier passages lack this sort of sorites
argument. Even though we must see this passage as containing a sorites
argument of some complexity, does it contain or imply a theory of language,
and so, does this support the theory that Hansen attributes to all Chinese
philosophers, including Confucius? It is easy to see why this sorites argument is theory neutral and, as such, neither implies nor invokes Hansens
candidate theories.
Take, for example the claim that if names are not rectified, language
will not flow smoothly. Does this claim entail or presuppose Hansens early Chinese candidate theory of language? Does this statement entail, for
example, that interpretation is performance, not the assignment of truth
conditions to sentences? This statement is neutral about this theoretical
claim. It entails nothing about the nature or interpretation of language in
general. Moreover, someone who holds Hansens Western account could
easily agree with Confucius on this point. How is that possible? The most
natural reading of Confuciuss claim is the commonsense view that by making our normative terms clear, we can make clear our expectations and
requirements expressed in language. This will cause use of language to lead
to fewer conflicts of interpretation. A Western theorist of language would
not need, because of his theory that interpretation assigns truth values to
sentences, to reject this practical advice, and the theorist would, moreover,
not need to adopt Hansens theory that language is important only in guiding behavior to accept this practical advice as reasonable.
It is also crucial to see the way in which Hansens account of language, while similar in some ways to claims about language in Philosophical
Investigations, is crucially different. Wittgensteins views about language are
nuanced in a way that Hansens are not. The nuances make all the difference. For example, consider Wittgensteins famous statement: For a large
class of cases of the employment of the word meaningthough not for
allthis word can be explained this way: the meaning of a word is its use
in the language.16 The qualifications herefor a large class of cases, it can
be explained thusindicates that he is not reporting to us the essence of
language as such, and he is not saying how it must be defined, only how
it can be. These qualifications express his interest in providing a flexible
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view of language that can be used to resolve conceptual puzzles but not a
view that describes, whatever this might mean, how language is itself. This
interpretation gets additional support from what Wittgenstein says later of
his method, which is connected to his view of meaning: There is not a
single philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, different
therapies, as it were.17
Although Hansen is free to ascribe any theory of language he would
like to early Chinese philosophers, he may not, as he seems to be doing,
claim to find parallels for his view in Wittgensteins theory of language.
Wittgenstein has no such theory. It is easy to see the problem of associating
his view with Wittgensteins when it comes to his claims about what language communicates, based on his and the early Chinese view of language.
Hansen explains his view that language communicates a dao in terms of
Wittgensteins language-games:
[T]he focus at the early Confucian baseline is not on metaphysics, but on guidance. Dao does not communicate scientific
truths, but ways to perform. Dao is initially and basically a
prescriptive, not a descriptive concept. The role of language is
not representing a reality that is external to our inner psyche.
Its role is communicating and transmitting guidance to society
from social leaders through history.18
So Hansen claims that language-games communicate a guidance, not a set
of truths. Along this line, he continues:
Moreover, explanation of a persons behavior will have to focus
on the dao and the persons interpretation of it: If interpretation
of a social practice replaces belief-desire and practical reasoning
models in explaining behavior, this blending of correct (performance) and aesthetically pleasing (interpretation) is natural.
Interpretation and dao together explain action.19
In these two passages, Hansen claims that language communicates a dao and
associates that with the claim that language-games, of course a term taken
from Wittgensteins middle and later writings, communicate a guidance.
But it is important to see that Wittgensteins use of language-games would
never allow for this formulation. The opening passages of the Philosophical
Investigations exemplify his method of using language-games to clarify and
call into question just this very sort of abstract, essentialist account of lan-
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account has some basis in the text, would it be the strongest possible account
of Confuciuss teaching? In the next section, I offer two significant criticisms
of his account: the first criticism is that the account rests on a category
mistake: Hansen mistakenly identifies the concept of truth with a philosophical theory of truth. The second criticism is that only by making this
first, categorical mistake, can Hansen argue that early Chinese thinkers
lacked a concept of truth.27 Moreover, despite occasional indications that
it would be problematic to foist onto the early Chinese context a concern
with the distinction between prescription and representation, his account
relies on that problematic interpretation just by claiming that the early
Chinese theory of language treats it as communicating action-guidance, not
truths. Finally, I will argue that a superior approach to the relation between
dao and truth would see the two concepts as interdependent. For no form
of action-guidance makes sense without appealing to facts on the ground,
and claiming how to represent facts on the ground makes no sense without
appealing to those norms that guide speech. My account, although not
required by the details of the Analects, is, as I maintain in the last section
of this chapter, arguably consistent with the Analects and does not rest on
the problematic Western philosophical views that Hansens account of early
Chinese philosophy rests on.
More on Hansen
Hansens argument about truth in early Chinese philosophy intentionally
says something radical: Chinese philosophy has no concept of truth.28
Although radical, Hansens view gains some plausibility by being highly
qualified. He says,
Chinese philosophy has no concept of truth is a theoretical interpretive claim about the general character of pre-Han
philosophical activity. The argument is for the conclusion that
a pragmatic (non-truth-based) interpretation explains the general
character of the corpus better than does one that attributes to
Chinese thinkers the philosophical concerns characteristic of
the traditional (truth-based) philosophy. In part, the theory will
state how classical Chinese language explains the adoption of a
pragmatic rather than a semantic interest in language.29
These qualifications are important, but they also betray a problem with
Hansens account. They are important because they take out of the equation
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the even more radical claims that Hansen sometimes seems to be making:
that early Chinese thinkers lack any concept of truth. For his claim is here
reduced to the claim that Chinese thinkers [lack] the philosophical concerns characteristic of the traditional (truth-based) philosophy. That means
that early Chinese philosophers lack any articulated concept of truth that
plays a role in the philosophical theories that Hansen claims they develop.
Hansen says, According to [my] theory doctrines with a truth role are
absent; hence there is no such role, no concept of truth. He characterizes
this conclusion as a claim about the fundamentally contrasting nature of
Chinese intellectual activity.30
Hansen makes it clear that his claim does not require the even stronger
claim that there is no character pair in Chinese that could be translated
as true-false. (shi-fei) can, he claims, be so translated, but such a
translation might be misleading if one were to think that shi and fei are
used as part of the same intellectual activity in Chinese thinking as they
are in Western philosophical activity.31
We might then formulate his claim as follows: Early Chinese language
allows for a true-false distinction, but when early Chinese thinkers engage in
philosophical reflection, they employ a theory of language that does not have
an articulated concept of truth, and so their philosophical reflections, inevitably influenced by their theories of language, lack any concern about truth.32
This theory is then meant to explain why early Chinese philosophers lack
interest in Western-style metaphysics and epistemology: they had no concept
of truth in terms of which the questions of metaphysics and epistemology
could be articulated. Instead, the early Chinese philosophers had a view of
language that centered on learning how to use names and the sort of social
control that arises from enforcing speech that conforms to those distinctions.
One way to test the success of Hansens account, which is based on an
argument to the best explanation, is whether there are alternative explanations that he does not adequately discuss. It is easy to see how to construct
such alternatives. Because of my interests, I will couch my points in terms of
Confucius. Hansens explanatory account depends on the crucial assumption
that Confucius is offering a philosophical theory. So one fact he attempts
to explain is why Confuciuss philosophical theory lacks any appeal to a
concept of truth that would play some role in Western metaphysics and
epistemology. His explanation is that Confuciuss theory of language lacked
any such concept. But suppose that we call into question Hansens reigning
assumption: Confucius is offering a philosophical theory. Suppose instead
that Confucius were offering a self-cultivation process designed to help his
students to become more sensitive and responsive to dao, primarily through
the cultivation of and reflection on ritual practices, among other things.33
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also points out that there are various terms in classical Chinese that express
an interest in how things really are:
The early Chinese were very interested in the way things really
are; they just had a different way of talking about such things.
A state of affairs could be jan (so) or pu jan (not so), shih
(the case) or fei (not the case), and so forth. There are significant differences between these two ways of describing the
world, but the ancient Chinese clearly had an interest in and a
way of talking about the way things really are. The same thing
applies in regard to Confuciuss use of moral paragons. It is a
distinct this-worldly way of talking about human conduct and
very different from following abstract rules. But this does not
entail doing away with beliefs that function in the same way as
our notions of true and false.38
When Ivanhoe makes this claim, he is not thinking of the concept of truth
in the same way as Hansen (and Hall and Ames) do. For Hansen and
Hall and Ames are thinking of the concept of truth as part of a Western
metaphysical theory about truth, which they correctly find lacking in Confuciuss teaching. But understood the way that Hansen and Hall and Ames
understand it, Ivanhoes and Grahams claims about a notion of truth do
not contradict their own. For the claim that my mother has a notion of
truth is not contradicted by the claim that she lacks a theoretical concept
of truth. These are clearly both possibly true. Two questions thus arise in
this context: What is at stake in this dispute about truth, and is there any
way to resolve it while protecting the best insights of both sides?
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salient for him. Hall and Ames stress that Confucius is interested in the
use of language more than the truth of his claims, and as long as they limit
this to the claim that he is not interested in philosophical questions about the
nature of truth, they are right. However, it does not follow that Confucius
is not at some level operating with a concept of truth. And this would be
the case even if there is no exact correspondent term for truth in classical
Chinese. To show that Confucius has such a concept, all we need to do is
to show sufficient similarities between his uses and responses to sentences
and our own. And here I appeal to the later Wittgensteinian identification
of possession of concepts with practices and coming to understand concepts
by learning how to operate with a related set of words and sentences. Our
capacity to translate Confuciuss sentences into English requires such correlations, and once we have those correlations, it is easy to show that by
asserting, rejecting, and questioning a range of sentences parallel to our
own where we respond in the same way, Confucius operates with a concept
of truth because operating with the concept of truth means nothing more
than being able to engage correctly in commerce with a range of words and
sentences that we identify with having a concept of truth.
Perhaps what makes this conclusion disturbing is that it would seem
to require us to focus on the way Confucius uses language and the way his
usage is embedded in practices, without getting hung up on the theoretical
question of what truth is and how we can know what it is. If Wittgenstein
is right, we can have our practices and truth together within the context of
language-games, for designating which sentences count as true is not something that, for him, stands outside of these practices; instead, this type of
designation is constituted by these practices. If that is so, we can have our
pragmatism and semantics, too. Although I do not think that Confucius
was especially interested in the question of the relation between truth and
practice, we get a better account of what he does care aboutand a necessary one if we are to translate his utterances into Englishif we attribute
to him an ordinary concept of truth used for talking about dao. I will
defend the view that dao-seekingof the sort we find in Confuciusis
not separable from having a notion of truth and that this truth, in fact,
makes dao-seeking intelligible. But before I turn to that argument, I would
like to say more about what appears to motivate Hall and Ames in their
claim that Confucius and early Chinese philosophy lack a concept of truth.
Hall and Ames offer an argument about the absence of the concept
of truth that is, for the most part, identical with Hansens. In essence, they
identify the conception of truth with a theoretical account of truth. This
identification is stated clearly throughout their argument: [A] concept of
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truth has its locus within a particular theory.39 This claim is connected with
their further claim that what is at stake in their claim has to do with the
basic philosophical orientation of the Chinese: What makes the observation that the Chinese have no concept of truth distinctly nontrivial is that
this absence signals an alternative to the basic philosophical assumptions
implicated in the belief in a single-ordered world.40 Despite these strong
claims, they also admit that nothing in what they say implies that they are
denying the obvious:
Concerning the issue of propositional truth, Graham, of course,
agrees that Chinese philosophizing centres on the Way rather
than on the Truth. And we certainly agree with Graham that
this claim has nothing to do with everyday questions of fact.
Whether or not dinner is ready is a significant question in both
Chinese and Western cultures.41
This passage acknowledges that in this account of the differences between
Chinese and Western philosophies, there is no disagreement that in both
approaches everyday facts, and so truths, are not in question. Both sides
embrace everyday truths. The fundamental difference, then, appears to be
at the level of theory. Chinese philosophy develops a theory of the Way,
but Western philosophers of the Truth.
I find this approach unsettling. It suggests too strict a distinction
between Chinese and Western approaches and may itself rest on the Western distinctions between Fact and Value, on the one hand, or Theory and
Practice, on the other. But they make two more claims about the status of
their account that are both important, and, even if ambiguous, indicate a
possible successful resolution of these difficulties.
The first additional claim is their acknowledgment that everyday facts
are not themselves philosophically significant: The interesting and important issues generated by the search for truth are consequences of the strong
motivation of Western thinkers to move beyond the obvious to construct
theories.42 This claim can have two possible meanings: the first meaning is
that the philosophical issues about truth are nothing but issues of the construction of theories of truth that support foundational claims about truth
and knowledge of truth. On this view, truth would not be philosophically
important were it not for the epistemological and metaphysical project of
justifying claims of truth. The second meaning is that there is no important
question of truth outside the nexus of the Western philosophical problems.
There is certainly room here for alternative approaches to the one Hall and
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Ames take. For one can hold that in the everyday sense, prior to taking
up questions of theory, truths matter in a way that philosophers ought to
acknowledge even if they are suspicious of theories of truth and interrelated
epistemological and metaphysical theories. In fact, it would seem a clear
responsibility of philosophers to clarify ordinary senses of truth and their
importance.
Their second additional claim is that the Jamesian pragmatic account
that they embrace as an alternative to the standard Western account of
truth is not, they suggest, really a theory of truth at all. Pragmatism, they
claim, is committed to the rejection of ontology and the representational
understanding of knowledge, along with a focus on language as the central
metaphor in which pragmatists engage in philosophical discussion.43 But
then they pose the following question:
The functional equivalent of reflections concerning truth in the
Chinese tradition is closely related to what we term pragmatism.
But, if we say that the Chinese have a pragmatic understanding
of truth, are we not denying our claim that there is effectively
no concept of theory of truth in China? We avoid this inference
by noting that the pragmatic theory of truth...is itself less
a theory of Truth than a vision of the Way....As James says,
pragmatism is a method only. As a methodos, pragmatism is
merely a way, a set of means of instruments that permits the
accomplishments of certain practical actions involved in getting
on with it.44
The key point here is that, according to Hall and Ames, James does not
offer a theory of truth, but rather, a way to get on with things.
The points that they are making can seem odd, but with suitable
qualification and emphasis, can be defended. I start first with the oddities.
It seems odd to me that they do not admit that the ordinary importance
attributed to saying how things are ought to be important to philosophers,
even as philosophers. We want, I would take it, to understand the various
things we mean when we say how things are and why they should matter
to us. Second, a problem has to do with the dichotomy that Hall and Ames
operate with in their account but which they seem also to deconstruct. At
times, they distinguish between Truth seekers and Way seekers but seem
to allow no possibilities for other reflective orientations. These orientations
appear as exhaustive and mutually exclusive. But Hall and Amess acknowledgment that pragmatism offers an alternative theory of truth, that is, not
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If we were to take this approach, it would make sense not to look for
implicit theories in Confuciuss teaching, even implicit pragmatic accounts
of truth, but to examine his inculcation of normative practices and related
modes of reflection, which, rather than necessarily showing some implicit
theoretical commitments, show the ways in which Confucius encourages
cultivation of practices that embody norms and reflection on those norms
that deepens understanding. One way to do that without falling into inappropriate systematizing is to examine Confuciuss practice on a case-by-case
basis. This will not leave us with a theoretical elaboration of what truth is
but will provide hints and suggestions about how to understand dao (norms
about how to live well) and truth claims made possible through appealing
to learned norms governing cultivation and reflection.
Performative Language and Background Beliefs
In the first chapter, I described the relation between a novices learning of
bedrock practices under the tutelage of a master who has mastered relevant
norms governing the practice and the novices developing a grasp of the
meaning of concepts and ideals embedded in those practices. These relationships carry over to questions of what counts as true in various contexts.
In a perfectly ordinary sense, the master will be free to count as true the
novices applications of concepts to instances that reflect his or her mastery
of how to apply the concepts. These bedrock practices will be distinguished
by widespread acknowledgment of their authority and peaceful agreement
among those who have mastered the practices. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein
characterizes truth of utterances and their justification in terms of mastery of
a background system of beliefs and related practices that function as justifiers. Some propositions hold fast, and calling them into question or even
asserting them as true in normal contexts makes no clear sense. Nonetheless,
they count as the background in terms of which we distinguish between
true and false. What we do in making true claims and justifying them gets
explained in terms of these masteries.
If we take background beliefs and bedrock practices as the norms
governing belief and action, we can find room for ingredients for a clarification of dao, the range of learned norms that are dao-constitutive, and
the ordinary truths those norms make possible. Such an account will bring
about a resolution of the dao-truth dichotomy as well.
I will try to unravel these sorts of problems, bringing our discussion
down to earth by examining a particular instance of Confuciuss use of language that will illustrate why these philosophical problems need not arise. To
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this end, I turn to Yang Xiaos extremely important contribution to the discussion of interpretive practices in the Analects, How Confucius Does Things
with Words: Two Hermeneutic Paradigms in the Analects and Its Exegeses.49
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the Analects does not exhibit the narrow view of language Hansen attributes
to early Chinese thought.
Because Xiaos approach to the question of the pragmatic import of
language use in the Analects is to begin with examples and to generate his
claims about the pragmatic character of language use in the Analects from those
examples, his account makes it possible to ask what is going on in specific
passages without presupposing some prior account of what must be happening.
Xiao begins his analysis with a translation of Analects 11.22, divided
into three sections:
(a) Zilu asked, Should one practice immediately what one has
just learned? The Master said, As ones father and elder
brothers are still alive, how could one practice immediately
what one has just learned? Ran You asked, Should one
practice immediately what one has just learned? The Master
said, One should practice immediately what one has just
learned.
(b) Gongxi Hua said [to Confucius], When Zilu asked you,
Should one practice immediately what one has just learned?,
you said, Ones father and elder brothers are still alive.
When Ran You asked you, Should one practice immediately
what one has just learned?, you said, One should practice
immediately what one has just learned. I am confused, and
would venture to question this.
(c) The Master said, Ran You has a tendency of shrinking back
easily. This is why I was pushing him forward [with those
words]. Zilu has the energy of two men. This is why I was
holding him back [with different words].51
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of Confuciuss speech act. It is clear, however, that he has not done that or
that Confuciuss locutionary act is problematic. My tendency is to see the
problem in Xiaos representation.
My suggestion is that the problem arises from thinking that Confuciuss speech act has a clear content capturable in terms of a bi-conditional.
It also seems strange to think that Confucius had the sort of speech act
intention that Xiao attributes to Confucius. Let me make this point clear
by offering an alternative account of this section of the passage.
My own reading of this passage puts it in the context of the sort of
opportunity-to-teach approach that Confucius takes to dialogical encounters
with his interlocutors. He takes the opportunity to make a suggestion to his
interlocutors about how to improve their conduct in such as way as to help
get them closer to the relevant virtue under discussion. So, for example, to
his interlocutors who ask about (ren), he gives different answers. It is
clear because of his different answers that he does not offer them full-blown
accounts of (ren) but partial accounts, what I have elsewhere referred to
as interventions designed to move them closer to (ren). This approach
reflects his practical approach to dialogue.
This approach to understanding dialogues about particular topics, like
(ren), also influences how best to interpret the questions. The typical
question form, as presented in the Analects, is A (wen X) where A is
replaced by a persons name or pronoun and X is replaced by some virtue,
say (ren). Often, the best interpretation of this question is A, the person
in question, asked how to practice or achieve X. The response then says how
Confucius thinks the person should practice the relevant virtue. The interlocutor neither asks for nor gets a complete, de-contextualized account of (ren).
So, what does Confucius intend in the exchange? He intends to get
his interlocutor to change his behavior, and he intends for his interlocutor
to understand that he (Confucius) thinks that the best way for his interlocutor in the present context to get closer to the relevant virtue is to follow
his recommendation. Lets call the recommendation the interlocutor-specific
virtue-formulation, and his intention for the interlocutor to be that he
devote himself to practicing this formulation.
This context is basically pedagogical. And the exchange needs to be
understood in those terms. Keeping this background context in mind,
we can ask what Confuciuss locutionary act is. Confucius intends that
his interlocutor believe that Confucius intends to motivate him to devote
himself to the virtue-formulation offered, not because it is the final decontextualized formulation about when a person should put learning into
practice, but because a master recommends it.
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Truth in On Certainty
Wittgensteins On Certainty is the result of a complex, rich effort at the
end of his life to make sense of and correct G. E. Moores accounts of
certainty and related refutation of skepticism.56 Central to Wittgensteins
critique of Moore is that Moore confuses certainty with knowledge. In
his discussions, Moore lists things we all know with certainty. They would
include claims like, The world exists, Here is a hand, uttered while the
speaker raises his hand, shaking it, and I have not lived off of the surface
of the earth. Wittgensteins investigation follows the same sort of criss-cross
method of philosophizing, clarifying his thoughts, then moving on, only to
return to the same problem in a new context, clarifying it in a new way,
and so on. Although this is one of the most enigmatic of Wittgensteins
published journals, some claims find general agreement by interpreters.
Wittgenstein distinguishes between meaningful propositions, which
are either true or false, and those sentences, which appear to be meaningful,
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Invoking Dao
In contrast with the accounts of Munro and Hansen, a speech act account of
language use in the Analects provides a way to understand how Confuciuss
project relates to the truth. Xiao points out that the different answers to
Zilus and Ran Yous questions presuppose a common principle, which he
presupposes but does not announce in his answers.
It is easy to see that behind this practical thesis, there is a more general
thesis: What has just been learned should be put into practice with the right
speed, which is neither rash nor sluggish. This is Confuciuss philosophical
doctrine of the mean regarding the temporal relationship between learning
and practice. Confucius does not explicitly state such a thesis, although
we can imagine that there could have been a sentence at the end of 11.22
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in which the Master makes this general thesis explicit, just as he does on
another occasion:
Zigong asked: Who is better: Zizhang or Zixia? The Master
said: Zizhang overshoots and Zixia falls short. Zigong said:
Then Zizhang must be the better one? The Master said: To
overshoot is as bad as to fall short. (Analects 11.16)61
So even if Confuciuss specific answers to Zilus and Ran Yous questions are different, they presuppose a more general normative claim, namely,
that a persons conduct should neither be excessive nor deficient. Xiao claims
that this is Confuciuss doctrine of the mean. He never says what he means
by doctrine, but it is clear that there is very little elaboration or defense
of this and other doctrines in the Analects, so it might be better just to
characterize this as a constituent of dao, a background belief functioning
as a normative claim. The sort of Austinian framework that Xiao brings
to his pragmatic analysis of 11.22 should help us to clarify the way in
which Confucius, in his exchanges described in 11.22, stands in relation to
this normative claim. Even though Confucius does not utter this normative
claim, his answers to Zilu and Ran You presuppose it. We might then say
that in answering these two different questions, he invokes this normative
principle, where invoking itself is a speech act. In this case, his invoking
comes in the form of a tacit appeal, which, when necessary, as in the 11.16
passage, required an appeal to the explicit norm.
If this approach to Analects 11.22 is reasonable, it shows something
fundamental about Confuciuss relation to the truth. It would be hard to
understand 11.22 without understanding Confucius as appealing to these
norms about how to live well (dao). And even in 11.16, it would be hard
to understand why he would say, To overshoot is as bad as to fall short
unless this norm were a constituent of dao. Even if we say that he merely
wants to bring about a world in which people operate by the principle of
moderation, the question is, why he would want to do that? We can imagine a number of possible answers to that question, but without attributing
to him, at least, some minimal acceptance of this principle, and the true
claim that dao requires it, making sense of why he seeks to influence Zilu
and Ran You in the ways he does becomes impossible.62
Why, then, doesnt Confucius just provide the 11.16 abstract version
of the normative principle to Zilu and Ran You? If that is his bottom line,
certainly, he ought to enunciate it. But his reluctance to enunciate it arguably makes good pedagogical sense. In seeking to intervene in their conduct
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in such a way as to help them improve their behavior and, in so doing, get
closer to (ren), it would not help to say, To overshoot is as bad as to
fall short. For this claim, while a component of Confuciuss background
normative beliefs, is practically empty: that is, it is not by itself helpful in
guiding action. It doesnt tell Zilu to slow down or Ran You to speed up.
They will understand better the deficiencies in their conduct much later,
only retrospectively having practiced differently. For, as I have been arguing,
Confucius holds that successful reflection emerges out of study, by which
he means practice. Indeed, invoking the general principle, given that it is
empty, would have offered Zilu and Ran You an important principle, but
they could have remained ignorant about their state of moral development;
instead, Confucius gave each one the guidance he needed to continue to
struggle, slower or faster, toward ren/dao.
But there is a second way in which Xaios analysis helps us understand
how Confuciuss pragmatic project stands in relation to the truth. For if we
understand the questions asked by Zilu and Ran You as questions about
how each one should put into practice what he has just learned and Confuciuss responses as indicating how each should put this into practice as a
way to get closer to (ren) and dao, then we can see that his answers are
intended not only to influence behavior, but also to be true and to influence behavior in positive ways because they are true, based on Confuciuss
knowledge of facts about students lives and on his empathetic understanding and observation of their temperaments.
Finally, by appealing to Wittgensteins notion of background beliefs,
there is a third way in which this analysis sets a limit to inquiry, something
the pragmatic accounts I have been examining seek to do. Raising certain
types of questions about background normative beliefs requires an insistence on their correctness and a renewed effort at teaching the questioner,
whose questions betray misunderstanding of the language-games in which
these questions have their meaning, not meaningful requests for answers to
meaningful questions.
Based on these points, I offer a fundamental interpretive conclusion
about Confucius and his relation to truth, corrections of the pragmatic
understandings I have been criticizing. In Confuciuss dialogues with his
students, he interprets questions posed to him by his interlocutors, based on
the specific details he knows of their own moral progress, and he provides
answers designed to say how they truly need to alter their conduct in order
to get closer to dao in their actions and understanding. In doing this, he
uses his utterances to urge change in conduct. By urging changed conduct,
he invokes dao and its constitutive principles, which, when fully articulated,
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are indisputable for someone who has mastered dao, and yet he provides specific recommendations. As someone who has a deeper understanding of dao
than his interlocutors, he is able to make true claims about which forms of
conduct will get them closer to both dao conduct and understandingeven
if the background norms he appeals to are themselves neither true nor false.
These norms about how to live well do, however, make true-false claims
possible. As such, they are constitutive of the form of life that Confucius
inhabits and teaches. Questioning them requires a pedagogical response
including truth-telling, not a philosophical theory.
One consequence of this argument is that we must limit the use of
the law of excluded middle in forcing assent to propositions. If the question
whether p is true is salient for a person, then the demand that the person
assert p or not-p is justified. If the question whether p is true is not salient
for a person, then the demand that the person assert p or not-p is not justified. I pursue this line of argument further in Chapter 7, where I argue
that the law of excluded middle cannot be used to force Confucians into
theoretical stances on metaphysical claims.
. . .. .
.. . . . . .
.. . . .
Yan Yuan asked how to become morally good. Our Master said, Controlling oneself and returning to ritual practice is the way to become
morally good. On a single day, if a person has controlled himself and
returned to practicing ritual, then the whole empire would categorize
him as being morally good. Becoming morally good comes from oneself; how could it come from others? Yan Yuan said, May I hear the
details? The Master said, Dont look if it does not comply with ritual
action. Dont speak if it does not comply with ritual action. Dont act
if it does not comply with ritual action. Yan Yuan said, Although I
am not intelligent enough, please let me devote myself to these words
(instructions).
Analects 12.1
But what it is in philosophy that resists such an examination of details,
we have yet to come to understand.
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 52
Introduction
In recent work in English on early commentaries on Confuciuss Analects,
John Makeham and Daniel Gardner make the case for the existence of an
early understanding of the Analects and its project that, unlike alternative
commentaries during the Song-Ming period, was metaphysically silent, not
inclined to see Confucius and his disciples as appealing to deep metaphysical
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insights.1 In contrast to Zhu Xis commentaries, for example, the early commentaries of Zheng Xuan and He Yan tend to be philosophically spare
and not at all inclined to provide a metaphysical framework to justify or
explain the Analects teachings. Whereas Zhu Xi presents a Confucius of
some philosophical interestso this characterization goesZheng Xuans
and He Yans and their fellow commentators Confucius might seem to be
a pedestrian thinker with very little to offer philosophers.
Such an assessment of Zhu Xis superiority is not, however, philosophically neutral. I will argue that by being philosophically spare, He Yans
commentary, in particular, not only captures features of the Analects style
of thinking that Zhu Xis commentaries miss, but He Yan helps students
make sense of the depth of the Analects ethical project and the corresponding depth of the early commentarial tradition without appeal to tacit
metaphysical doctrines. Moreover, I will argue that Zhu Xis metaphysically
loaded interpretation of Analects falls prey to a trilemma concerning the
criteria for applying its concepts, which He Yans and his fellow commentators spare interpretation avoids. The trilemma arises from the following
three possibilities concerning the criteria for use of the concepts in Zhu
Xis commentary: (1) his criteria for applying the concept of self-control
are not different from our ordinary criteria, or (2) they are different, or (3)
they are not specified. In each of these three cases, his commentary suffers by unnecessarily attributing a questionable account to Confucius. In
preparation of my presentation of this trilemma, I will discuss the practical
significance of details in Confuciuss project and the depth of the practical
problems he addresses, and then I will liken Confuciuss approach to these
issues with Wittgensteins.
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to speak about/elucidate one aspect of the virtue, namely, the aspect that
the interlocutor needs to practice more often or improve upon, given the
one-sided understanding and conduct the interlocutor exhibits and given his
development toward becoming a person who desires to fulfill the requirements for practicing the virtue without limitation. Confuciuss response to
Yan Huis first question about (ren) may indicate his understanding of
the one-sidedness of Yan Huis character and conduct. Perhaps Confucius
felt that Yan Hui did not give enough attention to the practice of ritual or
that even if he did, he had not yet reflected sufficiently on the import of
practicing ritual (li).
The approach I am taking here rests on rejecting the claims that this
or other passages offer an analysis of (ren). Confuciuss project is practical.2 By rejecting the view that Confucius presents analyses of (ren),
this approach also rejects instrumentalist and definitional analyses of the
relation between (ren) and (li). My critique of these types of analyses
of the relation of (ren) to (li) borrows from Kwong-loi Shuns Jen
and Li in the Analects. 3 Shun attributes a third analysis to Confucius,
which he calls constitutive. Basically, he claims that Confuciuss constitutive view asserts that for a community, a set of practices (li) are necessary
and sufficient for being (ren), but his key example of this relationship
is problematic. Shun claims that in a particular community, sacrificing to
ancestors is necessary and sufficient for feeling indebted to those ancestors.
But he seems to hold that where there is no conventional ritualistic means,
like making a sacrifice to honor ancestors, for expressing this attitude, there
is no way to express it at all. So he attributes to Confucius the view that
without the (li) by which we sacrifice to ancestors, we have no way to
express indebtedness to them.
Shun likens this necessity to the necessity of having linguistic practices
in order to have certain concepts, such as needing particular language to
express and understand the concept of the past. But these cases are different
in important ways because a ritual of behavior to express a feeling cannot
be equated with a linguistic practice used to comprehend a concept. I can
always say, whenever the topic of respect for parents comes up, that I am
thankful for the efforts of my parents and for their parents; this is my way
of expressing my indebtedness without having a specific ritual in our culture for doing so. My own language is adequate for those purposes. Shun
claims that we can attribute this constitutive analysis to Confucius. But
even Shun acknowledges that Confucius never articulates this view himself.
Nevertheless, we ought not to attribute any view, much less a false view,
to Confucius unless he explicitly states it, implies it, or suggests it because
he need to say it to make other things he says intelligible. It would make
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Zhonggong already provides details. But nothing makes this clear. The
answer Confucius gives to Zhonggong is a grab bag of important recommendations. Certainly, it is possible to imagine a request for further information about how to fulfill any of the recommendations. Nonetheless, the
fact that Confucius frames his answer around a list concerned with how to
avoid resentment suggests that this issue was one he felt Zhonggong needed
to address. And although we might suppose that Yan Hui needed to pay
more attention to ritual as a mode of moving toward practicing (ren)
without defect, we find an example on his part of exemplary behavior as
a lover of learning, which both encompasses and transcends Zhonggongs
behavior, in Yan Huis request for details. If this is right, then how could
knowing the details be so important? I address this issue by examining in
more detail Yan Huis strengths and weaknesses as a student.
B. Not only do details matter for advanced students, but such students understand this and seek them when needed. Indeed, even advanced
students like Yan Hui find themselves in situations like this, in which they
need help from Confucius to know how to make the next step on the dao.
Consider Analects 9.11:
. . . . .
. . . .
. . . .
Yan Yuan sighed admiringly, saying, The more I look upward
toward it (Confuciuss dao), the higher it seems. The more I dig
deeper into it, the more impenetrable it seems. When I see it
ahead, suddenly it is behind. Our Master is adept at guiding
others step-by-step. He broadens our knowledge by having us
practice cultural refinement. He restrains our conduct by having us practice ritual actions. Even if I intend to complete this
instruction, I cant. When I have exhausted my capabilities, it
seems like it (our Masters dao) still stands there, majestically.
Even though I desire to follow it, I have no way.
Although this passage is sometimes understood to be a Daoist teaching
injected into the text, there is no reason to think so. All we need to suppose
is that (a) practicing (ren) places the practitioners conduct in relation
to an ideal that can never be completely realized, (b) the practices of
(ren) are complex, and (c) accomplished practitioners are required to provide
guidance to apprentices, because (d) the way forward on dao is often unclear
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. . . .
.
Zigong said: The cultural ornamentations (speech and conduct)
of the Master: they can be heard. As for our Masters words on
nature and the heavenly way, we cannot hear them.10
On the interpretation I favor, which seems the most straightforward one,
this passage indicates that Confucius did not talk about metaphysical topics,
or if he talked about such topics, he did not share them with his students.
The closest we get to an ultimate teaching, I would contend, is the invocation, without a detailed analysis, of those ideals that constitute dao.
Along with such an invocation, Confucius offers ethical interventions
designed to draw his interlocutor toward these dao-constituting ideals. I
mean by intervention the attempt to get an interlocutor to understand
better the ethical norms he is living under by recommending changes in
behavior in relation to an ethical ideal or raising skeptical questions about
mistaken identifications of an ideal with some related but different form of
conduct. I borrow this term from D. Z. Phillips:
Interventions in ethics are often needed because of our deeprooted tendency to theorize in ethics. We want to give a general,
theoretical account of Morality. We search for its essence. The
intervention we need, in that event, takes the form of reminders
of possibilities, which the so-called essence cannot account for.
Our trouble is not that we have failed to locate the real essence,
or misdescribed the essence. The trouble lies in the assumption
that there is an essence of something called Morality. We are
rescued from the futile search for it by coming to pay attention
to the heterogeneity of moral practices.11
This sort of intervention requires getting the philosopher to change his
approach to philosophy by getting him to pay attention to and care about
the heterogeneity of practices. This change in the philosophers perspective
as he pays attention to the diversity of practices gives rise to a change in
his assumptions and in what seems interesting. The trouble about essences
disappears.
Confuciuss interventions, while not concerning the problem of
essence, are designed to produce progress in complying with the dao. Interventions cause deep-seated problems to disappear but, importantly, without
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b. These problems are also deep in the sense that they are
the sorts of confusing problems every morally sensitive or
reflective person confronts. It is easy, even for reflective
persons, to be confused about the content and requirements
of the ethical ideals under which they live. This last point
relates to c.
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complex, ideal, complete conceptual clarity that requires complete elimination of faults in clarity and attaches to this ideal a piecemeal, step-by-step
method for making progress toward realizing it; (2) he uproots the tendencies
of thought that keep one from realizing that the ideal requires a complex
set of interventions; and (3) he recognizes that because realizing this ideal
is complex, individuals can easily lose their way in attempting to realize it.
So, for Wittgenstein what is required is a form of philosophical therapy to
eliminate, one by one, obstacles to the ideals full realization.
In his later philosophy, Wittgensteins goal, like Confuciuss, is to
achieve an absolute ideal, to remove lack of clarity altogether, which is
arguably impossible for any person to achieve. He says:
For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity.
But this simply means that the philosophical problems completely disappear.
The real discovery is the one that enables me to break off
philosophizing when I want toThe one that gives philosophy
peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring
itself into question.Instead, a method is now demonstrated by
examples, and the series of examples can be broken off. Problems
are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem.18
What Wittgenstein offers, then, in the face of the failures to achieve
the ideal of complete clarity, is a method that can function whether or not
complete clarity gets achieved. The substitute method, then, is to make
limited progress on getting clear about specific examples, but it also allows
for breaking off the investigation of examples in order to create an ersatz
clarity: situations in which one can stop doing philosophy when one wants,
in which one is not obsessed to get the complete clarity, which may be in
principle impossible to achieve.
Wittgensteins method focuses on uprooting individual problems:
deeply rooted, difficult to alter tendencies of thought that give rise to problems that tend to be intractable as well as disturbing:
The problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of
language have the character of depth. They are as deeply rooted
in us as in the forms of our language, and their significance is
as great as the importance of our language.19
A simile that has been absorbed into the forms of our
language produces a false appearance, and this disquiets us. But
this isnt how it is!we say. Yet this is how it has to be!20
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desires, trying to prevent the return to heavenly principle. Each of the four
details, is, moreover, given a specific metaphysical significance: Looking is
said to be founded on the essence of holding the original heart-mind fast.
Although Zhu Xis commentary might seem more profound because
it interprets 12.1 in metaphysical termsthis is Gardners assessmentI
maintain that it contradicts Confuciuss project of wedding reflection with
learning practices and with his ethical intervention, which works primarily
by using ordinary, nontechnical language to urge changes in conduct.
But even if this interpretive argument, worked out in detail, is inconclusive, that is, even if both of these readings are possible given the textual
evidence, I would argue that Zhu Xis attribution of an ethical metaphysics
to Confucius also fails on theoretical grounds, for it suffers from a trilemma:
The trilemma arises out the following three possibilities concerning the criteria for use of the concepts in his commentary: (1) his criteria for applying
the concept of self-control are not different from our ordinary criteria, or
(2) they are different, or (3) they are not specified. In each of these three
cases, Zhu Xis commentary suffers by unnecessarily attributing a questionable account to Confucius.
In developing this criticism, I appeal to Wittgensteins later strategies
of clarification of ordinary language. Keep in mind one of his key dicta,
For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.29 We can
see how He Yans commentary, in its fidelity to Analects, interprets 12.1s
ordinary, philosophically unproblematic language: (li) are ritual practices, not heavenly principle (tianli). (fu) means to renew or restore
a practice, after having let it lapse. (keji) means to restrain oneself,
in some ordinary sense, where the referent of (ji) is not separately
specified as referring to some metaphysical entity, as it is not so used when
we typically uses phrases of that sort, like restrain oneself, deceive oneself,
etc. This language is understandable from the vantage point of ordinary
language and practice. For in an ordinary sense, I restrain myself just by
engaging in the rites or other activities, which requires in an ordinary sense
doing what I am not already tending to do, and so, practice. We often use
the injunction control yourself just to encourage the person to proceed
with more care and not to be easily distracted by earlier habits. But Zhu
Xis account of the meaning of self-restraint (keji) places on us the
further requirement of returning to our original mind, thereby requiring
that selfish desire be expunged and original mind activated. But what are
the criteria for applying these metaphysical concepts?30 We can pose one
of three possibilities: (1) these criteria are not different from our ordinary
criteria for self-control, or (2) they are different, or (3) Zhu Xi has not
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specified them. In each of these three cases, there is a serious problem for
Zhu Xis metaphysical account.
In the first case, if the criteria for applying the metaphysical comments
are not different from ordinary ones, then the metaphysical language that
Zhu Xi employs just presents a misleading way of expressing the ordinary
notion of self-control, which has no further meaning. In that case, we can
drop his account as adding nothing to He Yans account.
In the second case, if the criteria for applying metaphysical concepts
differ from the ordinary ones, then his interpretations will put his readers
at odds with the ordinary criteria that are and even, from a practical view,
ought to be indicated by the Analects passages. Given Confuciuss goal to
intervene with recommendations of changed behavior, it is crucial that the
concept of self-restraint (keji) is understood by his interlocutors in
an ordinary way, using ordinary criteria, not using technical metaphysical
criteria neither available to them nor spelled out by him. To offer metaphysical criteria will put his interlocutors at odds with themselves. For their
practical understanding will require them to interpret (keji) in an
ordinary, nontechnical sense, but the metaphysical account Zhu Xi offers
will require them to use competing, technical concepts. Indeed, if these
criteria differ from their ordinary correlates, one can ask whether a person
who has controlled oneself in the ordinary sense has returned to his original
mind, in Zhu Xis technical, metaphysical sense. Worse yet, a person may
have satisfied the criteria for controlling himself in the ordinary sense but
not have satisfied the criteria of the technical concepts. This approach will
leave his interlocutors in conceptual confusion, which can negatively impact
practice and in some cases foster moral skepticism.31
In the third case, if these metaphysical terms lack any clear criteria
for their fulfillment, they are meaningless. Theoretical concepts that lack
criteria for their application lack meaning.32
This trilemma, which will apply equally to any other metaphysical
concepts used by Zhu Xi, is inescapable.33 So if there is a non-metaphysical
way to interpret this Analects passage, then it should not be so interpreted.
My practical interpretation of this passage, following He Yans commentary,
captures the depth of Confuciuss project while avoiding this trilemma. This
argument should cause us to take a second look at the early commentaries
on the Analects. Their apparent superficiality provides us with a way to
begin to grasp the distinctive depth of the Analects ethical project. Moreover, a Confucius understood in terms of Wittgensteins interventions in
and against metaphysics provides a more defensible account of Confuciuss
ethical interventions.
Introduction
In this chapter, I address two sets of contemporary dilemmas for Confucianism. One is articulated by Jiwei Ci, the other by Alasdair MacIntyre. The
first concerns the ways in which Western philosophers have tried to renew
Confucianism through the resources of historicism, which has the effect of
removing it from its historical roots. Arguably, this removal also brings with
it the loss of any way to claim that this revised set of views is in any way
Confucian. The second concerns the need for a metaphysical grounding
for Confucian ethics that will make it possible for Confucianism to avoid
the charge of parochialism. However, according to MacIntyre, to avoid this
charge, Confucianism will need, in the end, to adopt an account of the unity
of virtues that would bring it in line with Aristotelianism. If Confucianism
were to give an account of its unity of virtues, proving how it fits Aristotelian requirements for consideration as a legitimate philosophy, Confucianism
would not even in this case offer a distinctive account of ethics.
Both of these dilemmas raise the fundamental question of whether
and how Confucianism can sustain itself as a distinct approach to ethics
in contemporary ethical debate. My burden in this chapter will be to show
how these two sets of dilemmas arise from an optional set of questions that
Analects-style Confucianism would find lacking in salience and that the
Wittgensteinian reflection I have been utilizing in offering my account of
early Confucianism would find meaningless.
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how specific people can improve their practice and reflection and, thereby,
get closer to dao.
In reply, Ci might want to argue that without answers to those sorts
of second-order questions about justification, Confucianism cannot justify
its truth claims. And if it cannot justify its truth claims, then it cannot
justify its self-cultivation practice as one that truly brings us closer to dao.
Instead, in this case, all that Confucians could do would be to appeal to
theirs as local practices and admit to the parochial character of Confucian
ethics. I will put off a final response to this challenge until the next section, in which I examine very similar challenges from Alasdair MacIntyre.
As for Cis dilemma of how an updated, westernized Confucianism can
be justifiably called by that name, it is necessary to examine the presuppositions of the challenge. The challenge supposes that if contemporary, westernized Confucianism is not essentially the same as some specific historically
realized form of Confucianism, it cannot really be Confucianism.2 That is,
the challenge supposes that there must be some essence to Confucianism
that the term Confucian introduces. Absent those features necessary to
Confucianism, a view does not deserve that name. However, the history of
Confucianism is a record of changing views.3 We might then do better to
think of the term Confucianism as a family resemblance term. As such,
we will be able to locate a range of positions that have gone under that
name. For example, despite key differences in frameworks, Confuciuss and
Zhu Xis teachings can fall under the term Confucianism without their
positions being identical. If that is so, then the question of whether a view
that forgoes a commitment to hierarchy in relationships is Confucian will
depend on whether those who authoritatively use that term Confucian are
willing to extend it and whether the story one tells about this new usage is
a story of successful transformation of the traditionone that respects the
past while finding ways to preserve it and making changes to fit the present
context and modern lifes exigencies. The problem of which contemporary
views that go by the name Confucian truly reflect Confucianism is more
complicated than Ci allows.
For example, Fei Xiaotongs sociology of Confucianism argues that
features of the tradition are bound up with the fact that it was developed
in the context of a largely agricultural society, where social order depended
on transmission of ethical practices and preservation of traditional forms of
authority.4 Developing a Confucian ethics within an urban context would
naturally require changes of emphasis. It does, however, remain an open
question what those changes would be and how they would get practiced,
understood, and sustained. It is by no means clear that urban Confucianism
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MacIntyres Dilemma
Alasdair MacIntyre offers a similar dilemma for contemporary Confucians,
one that sees the essentialist account of human nature as precisely what is
called for if the Confucian moral tradition is to escape the charge of presenting nothing more than an account of local practices.7
The dilemma that arises from MacIntyres account is that Confucianism can either (a) present itself as defending nothing more than a set of
local, perhaps idiosyncratic, practices, or (b) offer deeper foundations for
the practices it defends, in which case it must show itself to its rivals as
having an objectively superior account of human nature, and especially for
MacIntyres purposes, the most definitive rival, Aristotelian tradition.
It is an interesting feature of MacIntyres account of this dilemma that
he does not see it as arising from the external question begging demands
of Aristotelians for Confucians to think the way Aristotelians do. For it is
crucial to MacIntyres account of reason-based discourse in and between
traditions that each tradition must be accountable to its own fundamental
principles and that each tradition can be rationally accused of error if and
only if it fails to conform to its own principles of rational moral inquiry.
Thus, it is a key part of MacIntyres argument that he is able to demonstrate, within the history of Confucianism itself, the Confucian philosophys
demand for an objective universal account of human nature that it can
use to provide a foundation for its moral claims and to offer as a basis of
critique for alternative traditions. Nevertheless, within a context of crosstradition debate of the sort MacIntyre is engaged in, Aristotelians demand
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that Confucians either put up or shut up. I suggest that instead, Confucians
need to show Aristotelians that their account of human nature is wrong or
severely limited in terms of the principles that Aristotelians already accept.
However these larger debates proceed, MacIntyres dilemma is clear:
either the specific forms of (li) and the related account of (ren) and
(xiao) in the Analects and in the texts of the later tradition are just descriptions of local Chinese practices, or they can be detached from those merely
local, historical manifestations and be grounded in something universal.
No doubt, this dilemma presents a real difficulty for the contemporary
reception of Confucianism in North America. I will argue, however, that
the problem MacIntyre poses rests on the more general problem in any
attempt to find a philosophical home for Confucianism. Once we identify the Analects project with specific Western philosophical views, we can
generate various versions of these dilemmas. The solution that I propose to
this problem, consistent with the account I have been offering herein, is to
utilize the non-theoretical reading of Analects that I have been developing
to fend off this challenge. As I will argue, the Confucianism of the Analects,
which, in contrast with the writings of later Confucians, presents a model of
moral cultivation and clarification that is, in an important sense, distinctly
non-theoretical. This feature of the Analects is, however, not a failure but, as
I have been arguing, one of its strengths. The Analects presents examples of
moral clarification based on Confuciuss transmission of a local dao, a set
of moral practices that provide a powerful moral compass for its practitioners. My approach to this issue is not, however, unproblematic. For if the
Analects, as the founding text of Confucianism, shows the transmission of a
local dao, and that is the best way to understand Confucianism, then with
this sort of reading, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to articulate the
philosophical significance of the Analects. I will conclude my argument with
an indication of how Analects-style Confucianism can address this problem.8
My argument will develop as follows. First, I will discuss why, as
a consequence of treating the Analects charitably as a philosophical text,
these dilemmas arise. Next, I will examine MacIntyres view of the rational
development of tradition, which, he thinks, establishes necessary conditions
of rational development for the Confucian tradition. His account of the
rational development of the Confucian tradition depends on his claim that
Confucius had a relatively small place for explicit theorizing within the
moral life itself. I argue that this claim is tendentious and misleading. The
non-theoretical approaches to philosophy that we find in the later works of
Wittgenstein and in Confuciuss Analects offer a way to defuse the dilemmas
presented by Ci and MacIntyre by putting limits on the law of excluded
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within the moral life itself. And the end internal to that life, conceived in
Confucian terms, is simply to live an excellent way.16 What would it require
for this approach to theory to have been different? MacIntyres characterization of Aristotles view is revealing:
By contrast, for Aristotelianism, although practical intelligence is
something very different from theoretical, and a large measure
of practical intelligence can be had by those lacking in theory,
nonetheless, theory, by supplying a knowledge of that telos which
is the human good, a knowledge from which the first premise
of all practical deliberation Since the good and the best is such
and such derives, not only corrects the deficiencies of practice,
but also directs us toward that kind of understanding which is
the telos of every rational being. This relationship of theory to
practice, and of both to the human telos, gives expression to
the relationship of part to part and of parts to whole in a wellordered psyche. And it is in terms of the right ordering of the
psyche that the virtues and their relationship to each other are
to be understood. This is why defectiveness in any one virtue
in an individual person, being a sign of disorder in that psyche,
is a sign of defectiveness with respect also to the other virtues.17
This passage gives us an account of what MacIntyre takes to be required
for a theory of the virtues: an account of the telos, the purpose, of human
beings, which includes an account for the psyche, its parts, and the proper
ordering of the parts to each other.
This characterization is crucial for understanding MacIntyres claims
about Confuciuss limited interest in theory in so far as it shows what he
takes Confucius to lack as a theorist and why he thinks Confucius has any
interest in theory at all. Consider MacIntyres characterization of what Confucius hasa substantive disagreement with Aristotle on the unity of the
virtues, and what he lacks, a substantive account of the well-ordered psyche:
Confucianism denies this type of strong thesis about the unity
of the virtues. A courageous man does not necessarily possess
jen, although one cannot have jen without courage. But courage
can, on Confuciuss view, be put to the service of wickedness,
without thereby ceasing to be courage, and this disagreement
with Aristotelianism arises from a way of understanding the
relationship of the virtues which has no place for and no need
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. .. .
. .
Zilu asked: Will a junzi (exemplary person) venerate being brave?
Our Master answered: A junzi considers righteous conduct to be
the highest. A ruler being brave without being righteous tends to
be rebellious. A mean man being brave without being righteous
will tend to be a bandit.21
Given his arguments about incommensurability, MacIntyre should be
sensitive to the question of how best to translate the bravery passages he
appeals to. In order to use these passages as a starting point for his claim
of theoretical differences between Confucius and Aristotle, his translations
must be correct. The problem is that he assumes Confuciuss meaning for
(yong) as bravery is the same as Aristotles meaning for andreia, bravery. Given MacIntyres sensitivity to questions of incommensurability and
translation, he should at least wonder how these translations could be correct. The obvious problem is that he attributes to Aristotle the claim that a
courageous man will possess all of the rest of the virtues. This claim entails a
necessary principle for translation of any term from Chinese into Aristotelian
language: Any character trait that does not also require a person to have full
virtue (hereafter FV) cannot correctly be translated into Aristotelian terms as
courage or bravery. We might represent this problem by appealing to the
following device: Courage (FV) is the character trait of being appropriate
in situations of fear where being courageous with FV requires that the agent
have all of the other virtues. Courage (not FV) is the character trait of
being appropriate in situations of fear where being courageous without FV
does not require that the agent have all of the other virtues. Based on the
passages above, Confucius claims that The petty person has his Courage
(not FV), but his type of bravery does not use justice when engaged in
stealing. But this claim is not one that contradicts anything that Aristotle
says. Aristotle is discussing courage (FV), and Confucius is discussing courage (not FV), according to MacIntyre. I conclude that by his appeal to
these courage passages, MacIntyre has not made a case for his claim that
Aristotle and Confucius are involved in a theoretical disagreement about the
unity of the virtues because the claims he juxtaposes are not talking about
the same concept and, therefore, do not contradict each other.
Nevertheless, one might think that my argument fails to address the
larger issues of theoretical disagreement MacIntyre introduces between Aristotle and Confucius, as MacIntyre claims a whole host of additional disagreements for which he does not appeal to textual evidence:
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to make this argument successfully, he would have to show, against his views
of incommensurability, either that there is a common stock of questions all
ethical traditions must address, including A, or that there is some dynamic
within the Confucian tradition that requires that this question be addressed.
Alternatively, he might try to show that there is some set of implicit meanings in Confuciuss statements that indicate that he meant to take a stand
on various philosophical issues, even if those meanings need to be teased
out by later thinkers. In what follows, I will demonstrate why Confucius
need not be compelled to raise the question of whether Aristotles claims
about the relation of theory to practice are true.
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ing, he claims that there are no meaningful questions that these so-called
philosophical questions ask; he recognizes that there is no answer to be
given because no meaningful question was asked. I will call this avoidance
by exposure of meaninglessness.
Wittgensteins strategy is just one type of strategy for avoiding philosophical questions, suited to a particular intellectual and cultural context
and defined in part by a highly specific set of goals, for he wished in the
early to mid-twentieth century in a larger European context to combat the
requirement to raise and answer philosophical questions. In this tradition,
raising and answering philosophical questions are cultural and intellectual
requirements. In context, Wittgenstein seeks to demonstrate to Western
philosophers how to show the bankruptcy of these requirements and how
to become oriented toward human life in such a way as to forgo the philosophical demand to find foundations for common beliefs and practices.
Wittgenstein wishes to replace those demands with a form of clarification
that rests on the bedrock of an acceptance of human life as something given.
As given, the human form of life is not in need of foundations even if it is
in need of clarifications. For despite its givenness (that is, acceptance as an
unavoidable set of facts), human life is something we tend to misunderstand
in the very process of living it. Nonetheless, from this example, it is possible to imagine a range of alternative, critical approaches to philosophical
thinking. If we think of Wittgensteins project as situated in and against
an already well-formed tradition of philosophical thinking, starting with
Socrates and ending with (take your pick) Bertrand Russell, we can imagine
similar projects at various stages of the development of philosophy, including
projects that are essentially pre-philosophical.
Pre-philosophical projects of clarifying the human form of life, like
Confuciuss, do not, however, need to do battle with the Western philosophical tradition and the range of questions constitutive of it. So prephilosophical projects do not need to do battle with forms of philosophical
thinking that lead to confusion about human forms of life. Instead, prephilosophical projects battle confusions of different sorts. For example, Confucius attempts to practice a form of reflection designed to illuminate the
relationship between common ethical practices of the tradition in which he
finds himself and this traditions related moral ideals. He uses these practices
and reflections to challenge his contemporaries fundamental moral confusions. But instead of demonstrating a method of coming into agreement
with other traditions or other forms of life and struggling against other
forms of reflection that, in a fundamental way, call the human form of life
into question, Confuciuss project is to foster serious study of practices of
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And of course, can be in this sentence implies that meaning need not be
defined in this way. Given these qualifications, what would justify defining
meaning in this way? This question is of first importance, for Wittgenstein
will use this definition of meaning to expose a range of philosophical questions as meaningless. How can an optional definition warrant this rejection?
Before answering this question, I will show how this definition can be used
to expose as meaningless a range of traditional philosophical questions.
At Philosophical Investigations, section 47-8, Wittgenstein raises the
question of whether the colored squares in a rectangle are simple or complex:
(R)ed (W)hite
(G)reen
R W
This question gains its importance from the similar issue he addresses
in the Tractatus, where he claims that complex names are reducible to a
set of simple names and complex objects are reducible to a set of simple
objects. Simple names and objects represent a metaphysical, semantic bedrock, which may be analyzed further. He claims in the Tractatus that there
must be such a metaphysical bedrock if sentences are to be meaningful
because the only way a clear meaning can be assigned to a sentence is if
the sentence is composed of names that refer to simple objects. To grasp
the simple name-object correlates of a sentence is to know exactly under
what conditions the sentence would be true. For a sentence to lack such
an analysis, he says, renders it meaningless, thus, neither true nor false.
And if there were such sentences, then the law of excluded middle would
be false. However, as the law of excluded middle must be true, he thinks,
sentences, that is, genuinely meaningful sentences, must be analyzable. He
finds this requirement so strong that he thinks he can know it to be true
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even if we have never seen any such complete analyses for sentences that
produce those bedrock, metaphysical meanings.25
What this account of meaning, the so-called picture theory of meaning, introduces is the idea of a non-contextually specified set of objects that
guarantee meaning to sentences by indicating that sentences are made up
of simple names that refer to metaphysically simple objects. It is, in part,
this Tractarian project of the discovery of metaphysically simple objects that
Philosophical Investigations 47-8 is meant to challenge. The Tractatus project
is not raising the question of whether, given certain optional criteria, this or
that set of objects is simple or complex. It is asking the question, outside of
any specific context, of whether there is a set of simple objects. Philosophical
Investigations, section 43, is designed to show that this question lacks any
meaning. That is, it lacks contextually specified criteria for complexity and
simplicity, specification of which would determine its meaning, that is, its
use, in a language-game. How does this criticism work?
Wittgensteins specific examples serve to undermine the hold that certain views of meaning exert on us, especially when doing philosophy. In
order to undermine the apparent meaning of the claim that there is a set
of absolutely simple objects, he examines a parallel example of potentially
simple objects to show that what it means to say that objects are simple
requires specification. Once the specification is given, however, the question loses its philosophical character. Either a sentence is philosophical, in
which case it lacks clear meaning, or it is meaningful, in which case it lacks
philosophical significance. How does this example support these points?
What the square example shows is that without some specification of
what we mean by simple or complex, the question lacks meaning. We
know that the squares are colored. We also know that they have shape. We
could think of the squares as a shape plus a color. In such a case, we think
of the squares as complex. Or we can think of the squares, independent of
their quality as colored, as basic building blocks of the rest of the square.
By appeal to the first criterion, we will say that the squares are complex.
By appeal to the second criterion, we will say that each square is simple.
Which answer is really true? That is, which answer is true no matter how we
specify its meaning in some specific context? Wittgensteins view is that this
question only provides us with the illusion of meaning. Once the optional
criterion of simplicity is specified, we are able to say, relative to that criterion, whether the square is simple or complex. But this is not what the
philosophical question aimed at. It aimed at asking how things are outside
of any criterion-specifying context, which, Wittgenstein maintains, is not pos-
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sible. How would this view of meaning impact MacIntyres requirement that
traditions of morality must engage in theorizing about the human psyche,
human telos, and the unity of the virtues? MacIntyre claims that the goal
of a theory of virtue is to say how things are for human beings but not
how they are as determined by some context.
In defending this claim, MacIntyre uses the dialectical strategy of vanquishing opposing views by saying that any philosophy that cannot prove
its founding on Western, rational principles should abandon its views in
favor of his version of Aristotelianism. Lets suppose that he is able to get
Confucians to believe that it is important to understand that their traditions fundamental framework is inconsistent and cannot be repaired. And
suppose further that he convinces Confucians that they can best avoid
this problem and still say most of what they want to say about ethics by
becoming Aristotelians. What would the result be? On that basis, would it
be possible for such Aristotelian converts to assert and make sense out of
truth claims detached from their distinctive meaning-conferring contexts,
substituting Aristotelian-related criteria for applying terms to objects and
situations? It is true that if Aristotelians get all contenders to convert to
Aristotelianism, there will be no one left to complain that they are using
their own local criteria to make meaningful claims. MacIntyre needs more
than this, however, for he, too, needs some way to make sense of the meaning of his own truth claims that prove those claims, given the meanings
they have, to be detachable from the conceptual framework in which they
are embedded without loss of meaning. Only by doing so would MacIntyre
be licensed to say that the truths of his claims are what he says they are in
the strong metaphysical sense he advocates for others:
Of course anyone who makes a claim to truth for a judgment
or theory or conception or the relationship of mind to object
expressed in these does so from some one particular point of
view, from within one particular tradition of inquiry rather
than from that of its incommensurable rivals. But what is then
claimed is not that this is how things appear in the light of the
standards of that point of view (something which the adherents
of a rival and incompatible point of view need have no reason
to deny), but how they are, a claim in terms of fundamental
ontology. It follows that any claim to truth involves a claim that
no consideration advanced from any point of view can overthrow
or subvert that claim.26
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But all MacIntyre can say is that these truth claims, embedded in the
Aristotelian framework, mean what they mean only from the vantage point
of this framework. They are, as such, framework-dependent truth claims. Do
they tell us how things are in themselves? If Wittgenstein is right, we do
not even know what this latter question means because meaningful truth
claims must play a role in the language-games in which they have their life.
Although the grammar of most objective truth claims is that they are neither
timed nor relativized to person or point of view, it is just as true that we
can make no sense of there being truth claims without understanding them
as embedded in particular contexts that provide for meaning and criteria
of truth. So, although we must admit that the grammar of objective truth
claims is such that they are not relativized to time, person, or point of view,
we also must acknowledge that making truth claims is always embedded
within contingent contexts.
This is the Wittgensteinian path to undermining MacIntyres challenge
to force us to take a stand on the issues of moral metaphysics.27 But I have
also argued that for Wittgenstein, this view of meaning is only one possible
view of meaning. How can such a weak claim be used to refute MacIntyres
demand for philosophers to engage in moral metaphysics? I would argue
that Wittgensteins view offers us a way to set aside MacIntyres demand
by showing how his demand can be avoided. That is, MacIntyres demand,
which he presents as something Confucians must acknowledge, for Wittgenstein would be a meaningless demand they may avoid. For if we adopt
the view of meaning as use in a language-game, then we are compelled to
acknowledge that the term objective truth can only be contextually specified as playing a role in certain types of language-games. And although it
may be true that within certain traditions and developing certain types of
theories, MacIntyres characterization of the logic of the term true is apt,
it is by no means clear that all traditions must operate with the principles
of truth that are local to his version of the Aristotelian tradition. And even
if it is a feature of the grammar of the term true, said about sentences
put forth as objectively true, that these uses of true are neither timed
nor relativized, it does not follow from this that all such uses require, as
MacIntyre insists, embedding in some theoretical debate, in which only the
winners are licensed to use that predicate of statements they affirm. Indeed,
we use the word true all the time in various non-theoretical contexts:
for example, when I claim that another person promised to meet me and
should meet me. If one were free to assert this claim only as a result of
a theoretical debate between competing accounts of promise-keeping, few
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people would be licensed to assert it. But we often make this and other
similar claims. So we must, in that case, understand that the meaning of
the term true is its function in context. The Aristotelian effort to extract
some more metaphysically basic rules of usage beyond what I have already
acknowledged from the variety of language-games in which this term is used
is an effort to reduce what is complex, the myriad family of uses of the term
true, to what is simple, its sole use as a term in fundamental ontology.
But why do the Aristotelians insist that every philosophy and tradition must
look at the meaning of true in this way? And how have they managed to
hold the entire world of philosophy hostage to their judgment of what is
and what is not a valid question?
Elsewhere, I have argued that what motivates Wittgensteins view of
meaning is an ethical impulse, locatable in his early writings and present in
his later works, to come into agreement with the world (his early formulation) or forms of life (his later formulation).28 In his later formulations, we
find him affirming that there are features of human life and language that
we cannot escape despite an impulse to do so when engaged in philosophy.
The reason that philosophers often end up in conceptual confusion is that
they live in the world and speak ordinary language, but in their work they
seek pure ideals, which they take to provide a ground for our ordinary
ways of speaking or a replacement for them. But by embodying both sets
of commitments, the ordinary ones embedded in ordinary language and the
philosophical ones embedded in the theoretical quest for idealized philosophical concepts, they may live at odds with themselves. As philosophers
do not have the option of giving up ordinary language and the everyday
aspects of life in which it is embedded, they ought to find a way of engaging
in philosophy that does not leave them at odds with themselves and their
theoretical quests at odds with their philosophical selves.29 For this reason,
Wittgenstein commits himself to the following fundamentally important
approach to philosophy, based on a conception of the importance in philosophy of acknowledging the inescapable features of the human form of life:
The real discovery is the one that enables me to break off philosophizing when I want to.The one that gives philosophy
peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which
bring itself in question.30
To take this approach to philosophy is to take an optional stand on the
importance of ordinary language in philosophical thinking. It is to think
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have, which, although sometimes virtues and sometimes not, are nothing but,
at best, limitations of (ren). In these passages, he understands that fully
complying with (ren) requires complying with it in all of ones actions and
motivations involved in ones ren-governed relationships. If we understand
(ren) as complete virtue, this statement will appear self-evident. Why should
we be concerned about (ren) beyond its being complete virtue? What is
the foundation for (ren)? He does not say. What is the basis for (ren)
in human nature? He does not say. In contrast with raising these foundational questions, his approach to his interlocutors is to get them to correct
one-sidedness in their behavior and to practice (li), which is in important
ways the embodiment of (ren). So following this approach, for novices to
understand (ren) better, they first need to improve their ethical practice.
Presumably, the better their practice, the better their reflection on what
(ren) is and requires. But taking each step along the way of improvement, a
novice, just as Confucius experiences in his practice, will not have exhausted
the requirements for completely becoming (ren) or for understanding
(ren) completely. So what we have here is the following approach to ethical
pedagogy: One will come closer to fulfilling the requirements of (ren) and
understanding it by practicing the variety of constitutive (ren) practices
learned from a master. In contrast with what MacIntyre requires for making
truth claimsan ontology of virtue and a related account of the soul and
its proper ordering, which the utterer must, on pain of incoherence, claim
will not be defeated in dialectical encounters with opposing accountswill
this focus on practice and reflection make it possible for Confucius to make
truth claims about (ren)?
Confucius certainly thinks so. The autobiographical account he offers
of his own development indicates that he believes self-cultivation and related
reflection over a lifetime can bring one to an understanding of the heavenly
order:
.. . .
. ..
I have set up my mind in cultivation since I was fifteen. I have
had my stance since I was thirty. I have been no longer bewildered
since I was forty. I have understood the heavenly mandate since I
was fifty. I have thoroughly understood others words since I was
sixty. I have no longer surpassed the code rules while following
my heart and minds desires since I was seventy.41
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If one thinks, as Confucius does, that his forms of practice and reflection get one closer to a correct understanding of the ideals he is committed
to, then his approach, without theory, will not prevent him from making
truth claims. One key type of truth claim that Confucius makes is the
claim that (ren) is not entailed by this or that behavior. If Confucius
does not have a theory about (ren) that would support his claims about
(ren), how can he make such claims? Will the focus he gives to learning
and reflection on learning license him to make such truth claims?
We must assume that Confucius held that the combination of learning, practice, and reflection that he advocated did justify him in asserting
the truth of various claims he makes, including those he makes or implies
about specific behaviors not adding up to a persons being (ren).
We can, however, pose the following dilemma for Confucius. He
must either present a theory of the relationship among (ren), practice,
and reflection to justify his teachings or not. If he can, then he will be offering a theory of ethics, which we will be able to put up against MacIntyres
tradition. As a result, he will be forced to enter into the dialectic that
MacIntyre forces him into. He will thereby, however, need to develop a
theory to counter MacIntyres Aristotelian theory. In that case, he will
not have been allowed the opportunity to demonstrate the possibility of
a non-theoretical approach to ethics. However, without the development
of just such a theory, he will not be able to respond to MacIntyres challenge and, thus, will not be able to justify the commitments underlying his
pedagogy.
The only way out here is for Confuciusor his followers who wish
to escape MacIntyres dialectical demandsto appeal to justificatory features
of our practical situations, which call for acknowledgment of the basic
character and force of such justifications without theory. Of course, these
sorts of justificatory features are not far off. As soon as we desire them,
they appear.
All we need here is acknowledgment of contexts in which we rightly
employ first-order (practical) justifiers that do not rest on some second-order
(theoretical) justifiers for their justification. These are a dime a dozen. We
operate with such first-order practical justifiers all the time. I take it that I
just bought a cup of Starbucks coffee, and this is reason for thinking that
the cups contents, which I cannot see because of the plastic lid on the cup,
is coffee. How do I know it is coffee? I just bought it. If someone thinks
this is not a good enough reason, I can also have a sip. If someone is not
yet convinced, I might find further reasons, but the context will determine
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novices from the fundamental problems of self-cultivation at hand or engender skepticism. In such a tradition, a practical moral agent might judge
that the best use of time and energy is to work to improve his or others
everyday behavior in light of already accepted ideals. For example, in facing
an Aristotelians complaint that he lacks a proper account of the unity of
the virtues, a Confucian may take this complaint and the reflection required
to address it as both irrelevant to his project and not likely to produce any
positive results. No matter how one resolves the issue of whether there is a
unity to the virtues, both traditions will want to make sure that dispositions
toward courageous behavior are limited by appropriate moral standards.
The Confucian will call the petty mans theft courageous but unjust, and
the Aristotelian will call it cowardly because it is unjust. Nevertheless, both
will aim to affirm the same conduct even if what they call it differs. The
Confucian moral agent may rightly judge that he will not help himself or
others to improve through the resolution of this theoretical problem. He
will, moreover, be able to justify refusing the question on the practical
grounds that learning the tradition and mastering it do not require raising
this theoretical question.45
This practical reasoning might even be further strengthened should
the Confucian have an immediate sense of a moral crisis, arising from a
failure to engage in required practices or to understand the meaning of basic
moral ideals by reflection on those practices. So, for example, Confuciuss
concern to connect reflection on (ren) with the practice of (li) and
his related efforts to help his interlocutors to understand the ways in which
they misunderstood (ren) reflect his general sense of there being a deepseated moral crisis. In so far as a masters diagnosis of the crisis rests on his
view of the novices need for proper learning and related reflection, he will
be justified in treating MacIntyres theoretical challenges as a dangerous
red herring.46
What, then, will a Confucian say to MacIntyres challenge: that unless
and until he develops a theory and subjects it to critical scrutiny by Aristotelians, he cannot be justified in making truth claims for any of his moral
judgments? The Confucian will, if I am right about the import of practical contexts on assertions to knowledge, firmly refuse to waste time on
something irrelevant. We make truth claims all the time without subjecting
our claims to critical examination by theories. What counts as a relevant
objection to ones truth claims will be fixed by the practical context. A
Confucian can certainly, then, in the practical context in which he finds
himself, deny that his license to make truth claims has been undermined by
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215
Put to the task, without falling into the sort of theoretical debate
Confucius avoided, a defender of Confucius can use resources internal to
his or her own tradition to fend off MacIntyres challenge and continue to
claim rightfully that Confuciuss claims are true. And in so doing, moreover,
the defender can reject, as lacking salience in the Confucian tradition, the
variety of theoretical, either-or claims that are necessary both for Cis and
MacIntyres dilemmas.
What would be required to undermine Confuciuss ethical project? To
undermine Confucian ethical practice and reflection, one would need to
demonstrate that this practical project either (a) does not have the resources
for making truth claims about what is or is not (ren), or (b) tacitly
introduces a mistaken or unjustified moral ontology. I have argued that the
Confucian tradition can escape both of these problems.
I have argued that Confuciuss practices of ritual (li) point beyond
themselves to an ideal of complete interpersonal virtue, realizable in practices of ritual (li) and that these practices are embedded in a range of
practices of self-examination, designed to provide a path toward complete
interpersonal virtue. Although this account arguably shows why parochialism is not the problem that Ci and MacIntyre take it to be, there is another
way to show why Confuciuss practices are not parochial. For just as he took
the Duke of Zhou as his model for emulation, Confucius is subsequently
taken as a model for emulation by those who chose to follow him on the
path of complete interpersonal virtue.
An ethics, based on the embodiment of ideals in practices and the
meanings of those practices given by their embedded ideals, may, as it
does in Confuciuss case, be expressed by adherents emulation of previous
masters who were exemplars of the ethical tradition. To put oneself up or
to be put up by others as an exemplar of a set of practices is one way to
establish the meaning of the practices and their validity. I will discuss these
claims in turn.
There are various ways to establish, in a broad sense of that term, the
meaning of a moral ideal lived out in a set of moral practices. One way of
establishing meaning is by relating the ideals to practices. This establishes
both the ideal meaning of the practices and the concrete meaning of the
ideal. The concept of meaning that I am using here is a commonplace one.
I can ask what the meaning is of the virtue of friendliness and can answer
that in part by citing a set of instances of friendliness as central to our
use of the word friendly. I can also establish the meaning of a persons
specific friendly conduct by appeal to the ideal. But there is another way to
establish the meaning of moral ideals and practices, and that is in terms of
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the role those ideals or forms of conduct play in the life of a person who
exemplifies these practices and ideals.
A person whose life exemplifies a set of practices and ideals can function as an exemplar for later generations of those on the path to realizing
the ideals the person embodies. As an exemplar, he functions in various
important ways. His life may serve to inspire others. It may serve to instruct
others. It may also serve to communicate central insights about the ideal his
life embodies, about steps along the way to the ideal, and about the meaning of the ideal. His role in all of these functions is justified because later
practitioners understand him as the person who best expresses what it means
to live on the moral path to which they are committed. Later practitioners
may reject earlier practitioners exemplars. Later practitioners may use early
exemplars like steps of a ladder, which they can move beyond once they
have mastered those steps of the practice.50 Given the practical resources
of the sort of moral practices we have attributed to Confucius, it is easy
to see how this might happen. For, given that the ideal of (ren) is the
ideal of complete virtue in interpersonal relations and given that Confucius
himself acknowledges his failure to achieve this ideal, later practitioners may
use the life of Confucius and his teachings as stepping stones of learning
and then choose to travel beyond them. This stage of treating Confucius
as an exemplar is necessary to make sense of his teachings abstract ideals
and to motivate generations of practitioners. The form that emulation takes
for later generations of those who are on Confuciuss path might undergo
unavoidable changes because of changed contexts or deeper understandings
possible over a period of generations of practice. But the changes the emulation undergoes would have to be changes that make sense and that can be
justified in terms of the previous stage of understandings and practices of
(ren). As Confucius is reported to have said in Analects 2.11, .
.: One who infers some new knowledge by reviewing
some past knowledge can be others teacher.
The upshot of my argument is that local practices can constitute an
ideal and stand as the basis upon which the ideal is understood, taught,
and characterized.51 On this basis, one can make objective claims about the
ideal and its instances. These local practices establish the meaning of the
ideal and the basis upon which concepts of the ideal can be used to make
objective claims.
In this chapter I have challenged Cis and MacIntyres Confucian
dilemmas, which have as their bases a demand for a justifying theory. I
have done so by appealing to those practical, critical resources within Con-
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fuciuss practice and the tradition generally that give those in the tradition a
right to make Confucian claims and fend off demands to engage in theory.
We acknowledge such rights all the time. It is a philosophical illusion that
ordinary truth claims require theory. Wittgenstein sought to counter this
sort of claim, and Confucians ought, as a key mode of self-understanding,
to assert this right with confidence and without any felt need to offer a
theory to justify it.
Fingarette on Handshaking
Introduction
In his groundbreaking book on Confuciuss contribution to philosophy,
Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, Herbert Fingarette offers a philosophical interpretation of the fundamental insights of Confuciuss teachings in
the Analects.1 This text has occasioned enormous amounts of commentary,
some positive and some critical.2 My purpose in discussing this text in this
chapter is to distinguish between the most significant part of Fingarettes
discussion, his example of ritual (li) as handshaking, and his questionable
efforts to find in Confuciuss teachings a defensible philosophical anthropology. As my arguments in earlier chapters make clear, I find no systematic
theories in the Analects. I do not even find unsystematic ones. Central to
my argument is the claim that Confucius is represented in the Analects as
offering different teachings to different people in different contexts. I have
also argued that this fact is best explained in terms of his fundamental
project of ethical intervention.3 And even though Confucius is an ethical
interventionist, that role is compatible with his making truth claims and
invoking dao-constituting ideals in his interventions and with presupposing
views about those ideals. I have also argued that it would be strange to
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Fingarette on Handshaking
221
tions, which are based on his philosophical anthropology and his related
view of the nature of language. His account of an essential connection in
the Analects between ritual and mutual respect is not borne out by the text,
as there is no clear reference to mutual respect in the Analects. Second, I
will investigate the source of the philosophical distortions that weaken his
description of handshaking. Third, I will argue that these distortions arise
from his efforts to offer a philosophical interpretation of Confuciuss project
and use this example in support of Confuciuss philosophical anthropology
of ritual. Fingarettes theory of human nature wags his description and does
so by confusing an example of an ideal exemplar of ritual with its essence.
Shaking Hands
I begin this section by quoting Fingarettes handshaking example at length.
I divide his description into six sections and then proceed to analyze his
description section by section.
A. I see you in the street; I smile, walk toward you, put out my
hand to shake yours. And beholdwithout any command,
stratagem, force, special tricks or tools, without any effort on
my part to make you do so, you spontaneously turn toward
me, return my smile, raise your hand toward mine.
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A key problem with this example of handshaking is that the cultural act
of shaking hands, which is employed to support Fingarettes general theory
of ritual (li), is not neutral. His analysis of handshaking is designed
to support his view of ritual (li) as something magical, as something
that makes sense even if metaphorically, as an instance of a Holy Rite.6
Although some ancient Chinese rituals are Holy Rites, not all of them are,
even metaphorically, and defenders of Confucius need not think that all
rituals performed during that time were holy.7 I suggest that we rewrite the
example to get rid of these exaggerated characterizations. I will proceed with
a section-by-section commentary.
Fingarette on Handshaking
223
A. I see you in the street; I smile, walk toward you, put out my
hand to shake yours. And beholdwithout any command,
stratagem, force, special tricks or tools, without any effort on
my part to make you do so, you spontaneously turn toward
me, return my smile, raise your hand toward mine.
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actions of this sort as magical. If I reflexively gag at the taste and smell of
stinky (fermented) tofu, is this magical? If I reflexively refuse to take some
when it is offered, is that magical? If I instinctively take the tofu when it
is offered to me because I have been taught manners, is that magical? We
could say so if we wanted, but this way of speaking is artificial and seems
designed to give these acts a special status. But the more we see ritual acts
as by-products of training, the less magical they seem. The more we see our
responses to stinky tofu as reflexive, the less magical they seem.
We can revise the first part of Fingarettes description as follows:
A*. I see you in the street; I recognize you. I make eye contact,
walk toward you, put out my hand to shake yours. In
response, you turn toward me, make eye contact, and raise
your hand toward mine. These are episodes in the practice
of handshaking.
Once we place this activity in the context of a learned practice of greeting, including the training behind it, even if we want to call it spontaneous,
that just means that it happens as a form of mastery of a practice. We can
drop referring to it as magical. Thus, Fingarette does not give adequate
weight to the ways that spontaneity in handshakes arise from mastery of
a practice, not from anything magical.
Lets turn now to passage B.
Fingarette on Handshaking
225
ones action with others requires practice. When musicians learn to keep the
same tempo, is their keeping the same tempo spontaneous? No, it is the
by-product of training and practice that requires concentration of a certain
sort. It cannot be done just by willing oneself to do it because a person who
has not practiced and developed the skill to coordinate will not be able to
do so. If spontaneous means that it is not a result of painstaking practice,
then we need to drop the term spontaneous here as both musicians and
handshakers do what they do from practice. If spontaneous means that
as a result of training and practice, coordinated action arises when trained
musicians set out to keep the tempo, attending to the tempo as it develops,
not as the result of some mechanical enactment of, say, a memorized list
that they mechanically carry out, then we can call it spontaneous. But that
would just mean that it is coordinated activity of well-trained practitioners
who do not do this in the same mechanical way that novices do. But we
need not think there is anything magical about this. It is not the mechanical carrying out of a process, but rather, the exhibition of a mastery of a
practice. This sort of mastery is commonplace in a wide variety of human
activities. And so it is spontaneous in this sense of exhibiting mastery of a
practice, but this sort of spontaneity is not magical.
The subtlety of handshaking becomes evident to us, according to
Fingarette, if we compare the ease of handshaking done by a skilled handshaker with (a) the difficulty it takes to learn how to shake hands based on
written instructions, or (b) the difficulty adults have learning for the first
time to shake hands in cultures where the act is performed differently from
the way it is done in their own cultures. And this is conditionally correct: if
we start with activities learned by adults from written instructions alone, we
would tend to think of handshaking learned that way as practically impossible to learn. But the apparent subtlety, arising only from this comparison,
is artificial. It is the by-product of an optional point of comparison. Why
appeal to the aberrant case of learning handshaking as an adult through
reading instructions as evidence of subtlety? Learning handshaking as a child
would be something akin to learning childhood games like Ring around the
Rosy. These are commonplace, not surprisingly subtle, and not so difficult
to learn when we compare them to other things children learn.8 Children
learn this game readily, just as they learn to coordinate behavior in this
and other games. If we asked adults who had never played it as children
to play ring-a-ring-a-roses and to learn to do so from written instructions,
learning this would not be so easy. Would the ability to coordinate singing
and actions arise just from reading? Does the fact that, for many, reading would not produce coordinated action on the first attempt show that
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this activity is quite subtle? Once we place this activity in the context of
childrens games and the ways they are usually learneda combination of
imitation with occasional announcement of rules and experience of getting
called out when one falls down too slowlywe can see that these sorts of
learned coordinations of action are not all that subtle. Handshaking does not
go much beyond childrens games in complexity or in the sorts of learning
by imitation with a few corrective rules-of-thumb from time to time. Of
course, we can mean by the term subtle and the phrase hard to learn
from written instructions, but this is a special use of the word subtle that
does not support the claim that this sort of activity is magical.
This leaves us with the following correction of passage B:
What does it mean to say that the ritual has life in it and that we are
present to one and another? Fingarette places these terms in scare quotes.
Presumably, we are to understand that the ritual is not really alive and we
are not really present to one another, not in the normal senses of these
Fingarette on Handshaking
227
words at least. But this seems strange. When I shake hands with you, we
are certainly present to one another in a literal sense. We encounter one
another. I see you, you see me, and we are touching each other, engaged
in a coordinated activity. We do not get a clear explanation of these terms
from Fingarette except that at the end the suggestion seems to be that
because the act of shaking hands has by itself a meaning to it expressing
respect, we can say it has a life. So we can say that the handshake has
life, indicating that it expresses some meaning, namely, respect. Moreover,
we are present to each other, we might say, in the mode of respecting each
other. We connect. So the handshake has life in the mode of expressing
meaning, and we connect in that we both express respect for each other.
But we can drop the more paradoxical formulations here, the ones that play
into Fingarettes magical view, by saying that the act of a handshake is a
learned, conventional means for expressing respect.
The meaning of handshaking is not something all that strange. All
sorts of gestures have meaning. We do not, however, necessarily need to say
that gestures of every sort have life in them. When the traffic cop urges
me forward by moving his hand, does that urging have life in it in any
magical sense? If we say that it has life in it: that just means that it is a
motion that has a conventional meaning that we have learned by paying
attention to its role in directing traffic.
Fingarette points out that a conscious feeling of respect is not necessary for the handshake to express respect. And he is certainly correct.
Handshaking is itself, in many circumstances, though not necessarily in
all, an act expressing respect.9 The handshake, however, has to be done in
the right way to be more than an empty gesture. Sometimes it is an empty
gesture, such as when I put out my hand and quickly shake with someone
just to fulfill a social obligation. What is missing in these sorts of cases is the
attention and care I would give to greeting a person that is typically required
for the act to be completely successful. I do not need to think to myself,
I am respecting this person to express respect, but I do typically need to
attend with some care to the person to succeed in expressing respect. The
life and presence of handshakes, if I am right, are captured in terms of
the fact that handshakes done in a certain way in certain contexts succeed
in having meaning. A successful performance expresses respect. But in this
passage, Fingarette identifies the success of the handshake, its authenticity,
with its being done spontaneously, that is, without awkwardness.
There is, however, the case when someone shakes hands awkwardly,
putting his hand out too early and waiting, but the handshake does not
thereby become any the less authentic. With the right attention and care, the
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handshake, even including the awkward wait, can be fully authentic. That
is, a person can authentically express respect awkwardly. But Fingarettes
account would not allow for this case.
Fingarettes focus on spontaneity as the source of authenticity seems
to rest on his view, derived from Gilbert Ryle, that shaking hands and its
authenticity rest solely with the public, behavioral manner of the act.10 He
rejects any appeal to the inner, but he needs some substitute for the inner,
something close enough to it that is outwardly manifested, to make sense of
the question of whether or not the ritual is authentic. For him, authenticity in handshakes is gainsaid by the spontaneity of the handshake, that is,
on the way it is performed. Moreover, his emphasis on spontaneity, as he
understands it, supports his claim that such acts are magical. In contrast, I
have argued that authenticity of a ritual act does not depend on spontaneity,
but rather, on a complex array of contextual factors that make it possible
even for awkward, non-spontaneous handshakes to be authentic.
This leaves us with the following correction of passage C:
I now turn to passage D, which presents an analogy between handshaking and acrobatics.
Fingarette on Handshaking
229
Here, Fingarette makes two different claims. The first is that the success of
the acrobatic act depends on the acrobat not attending to the success of the
act while performing it. The second is that lack of trust in her partner will
undermine the acrobats performance. In the case of acrobats, these claims
make some sense. Lacking trust may affect a performance. The acrobat may
hesitate and disrupt her performance. And thinking during the performance
about whether she should trust her partner may disrupt her performance
even if she does trust him. But is the handshaking case similar?
If I wonder whether I really respect the person I am shaking hands
with, that thought does not necessarily undermine my handshake. I can
choose not to express my uncertainty and put my energy into making a
convincing performance. Moreover, I can set my reservations aside. If I am
practiced enough at handshaking and on setting aside my reservations, this
will not affect my performance. In fact, if having the feeling of respect were
required to express respect, theatrical performances of successful handshakes
and various forms of dissembling would not be possible. Moreover, lacking
respect for the person I am shaking hands with does not seem to undermine the handshake in the same way lacking trust undermines an acrobatic
performance. A split second hesitation for the acrobat spells disaster in a
way that a split second hesitation by the handshaker does not. This is true
in part because, as I have already argued, there are recovery processes for
the handshaker. My awkward beginning can be supplemented by added
warmth and response later in the handshake or in the follow-up to it. Or,
I can make a self-deprecating comment, making fun of my awkwardness
as a way of negating any negative meaning it might appear to have. But
this is also possible because handshaking can convey different meanings. I
might want my handshake to convey some reservations. I might wish to
convey that I am willing to engage with the person I am shaking with, even
though I express some sense of reserve toward him. An awkward beginning
may convey something appropriate in the context. Handshaking conveys a
family of meanings, not just one meaning.
I offer, then, the following revised account of section D:
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Fingarettes analysis of the connection between the depth of human relationship and the specificity of the ritual seems right and important. The
way in which handshaking expresses the kind of bond we have with a
person depends, however, on the relationship between the handshakers.
The way the handshake proceeds will depend, in turn, on our shared sense
of what sort of relationship we have and the norms governing expressing affection and respect for such relationships. But what is missing in
Fingarettes account is the claim that the meaning of the handshake, the
so-called depth of it, is not just a function of how it is performed, but
also a function of the context of the situation in the history of the relationship. His emphasis on the manner of the handshake as the source of
depth depends on his having ignored the way in which context establishes
meaning. If I meet a former student whom I caught cheating in my
class and who subsequently complained of my unfair, preferential grading
standards and poor teaching as an excuse for his cheating, no matter how
he approaches me, his handshake with me will seem phony unless it is
accompanied by some or all of the following: a retraction of his criticisms,
an apology, some account of his change in attitude, and/or a request for
forgiveness. If the person initiating a handshake is a colleague with whom
I enjoy a close relationship but whom I have not seen in some time, the
depth of the handshake will be a by-product not just of the act itself, but
also of this shared history. We need to rewrite passage E with an eye to
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even these sorts of improvisations are possible only as they are based on
mutual backgrounds of context, history, and improvisational skills in the
practice of handshaking.
This leaves us with the following revision of this section:
Now we have a revised, complete description of the ritual of handshaking, stripped of Fingarettes distortions and attributions of magic:
I see you in the street; I recognize you. I make eye contact, walk
toward you, put out my hand to shake yours. In response, you
turn toward me, make eye contact, and raise your hand toward
mine. These are episodes in the practice of handshaking. We shake
hands in a coordinated pattern of movement learned through (a)
imitating adults, (b) practice, (c) occasional announcement of
rules of thumb, and (d) mature self-examination on the meaning
of this practice and related adjustment.
The handshake has a meaning but not just by itself. It
can be performed smoothly or not, convincingly or not, and
authentically or not. The smooth performance is often a measure
of convincingness or authenticity, but not always. An awkward
handshake can be followed by a correction or by additional
interactions that will show it to be convincing. And even when
it seems to be convincing, we can suspect that the handshake is
not in some sense authentic. But additional context can provide
support for its authenticity.
Although my life depends on trusting my acrobatic partner,
my life does not depend on respecting my handshaking partner.
If I lack respect for my handshaking partner, I might not wish
to shake hands, or I might only wish to convey my sense of
reserve toward him. Handshaking can convey different meanings. There is no single, ideal form of handshaking. So we can
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Diagnosis I
The criticisms I have offered of Fingarettes description of handshaking
indicate a serious deficiency in Fingarettes account of the meaning and
authenticity of handshakes. I have argued that (a) he does not give adequate
weight to the ways that spontaneity in handshakes arise from mastery of a
practice (passage A), (b) aspects of the handshake he labels as magical are
forms of mastery seen in a variety of practices (passage B), (c) the meaning of
handshakes is dependent on context (passages C and E), and (d) handshaking involves mutual adjustments between handshakers (passages D and F).
It is important to understand better the source of these distortions. Not
only does Fingarettes account have difficulties, it also does not capture Confuciuss teaching. I will argue that these two problems are related. Fingarette
wishes to offer a philosophical reading of the Analects that ascribes to Confucius
a philosophical anthropology, a theory about our nature as human beings. I
have argued that Confucius has no such theory and that his ambition is primarily practical, not theoretical. But I would argue that the quest for a theory
also leads Fingarette to distort the phenomena involved in handshaking.
The theory that Fingarette finds in the Analects and endorses, based
on its relation to contemporary philosophy of language and philosophical
anthropology, is this:
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Fingarette on Handshaking
235
. . . , .,
., .
Master Jikang asked: To cause people to be respectful, loyal,
and industrious, how could it be done? Our Master replied, If
a ruler can face them with dignity, then they will be respectful;
if the ruler can be filial and merciful, then they will be loyal
to him. If the ruler can raise up the best ones, and educate the
incapable ones, then they will be industrious.20
The peoples respect for the ruler is not the result of the rulers respect
for them. Rather, he is dignified (zhuang ), and that in itself engenders
respect. This model of one-way respect also seems embedded in the important North Star model of rulership:
.. . .
A ruler should conduct government with virtue, should be likened to the North Star, lodging in its right position, while the
myriad stars show submissiveness to it.21
The ruler rules with virtue but receives ritualized acts of submission
from those below. This does not fit a model of mutual respect. And in the
following passage, a rulers respect toward those in a lower social position
who respect the ruler does not get mentioned in a context in which it could
be mentioned if it were important:
. . . .
. .
Our Master told High Minister Zichan, There are the four
ways of being a good ruler: in his conduct toward himself, he
is reverential; in service toward those above him, he should be
respectful; in support for the people, he should be kind; and in
employing his people, he should be righteous.22
Moreover, some passages in which respect (jing) occurs are not
concerned with respect toward another person, but rather, respectful diligence in ones own action. One might say they concern respect for the task
at hand. This includes ritual tasks.
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. . . . .
. . . . ,
. .
Sima Niu worried, asking, All others have their brothers, I only
have none. Zixia answered, I have heard this saying: Life or
death are fated, rich and honor lies in heaven. If an exemplary
person (junzi) shows respectful diligence without being
neglectful, dealing with others respectfully and complying with
ritual, all of the people in the whole empire are his brothers. Why
will an exemplary person worry about being without brothers?23
Key to this translation is the grammatical point that in this passage (jing)
lacks an object. It is, then, an intransitive verb. It means being respectfully
diligent.24 The passage also mentions dealing with others respectfully
(yurengong) but does not clearly link respecting others, as Fingarette
does, with ritual. The disconnection between mutual respect and ritual is
even clearer in Analects 3.26:
. . . . .
Our Master said, focusing on high position without generosity,
conducting ritual without respectful diligence, overlooking funeral
arrangements without sorrow, how could I look onto these things?
Confucius requires that ritual be conducted with respectful diligence, but
this would not add up to the claim, at least not obviously so, that all ritual
involves mutual respect.25 The Analects never attempts to explicitly associate
(shu), sometimes translated as reciprocity, with respect (jing) or
(gong). And the idea we find later in Mengzi, in his statement of the symmetry of respect, He who loves others is always loved by them; he who
bestows his jing on others always enjoys their jing in return (Mencius 4B:
28), is not found in the Analects.26
But perhaps this argument goes too fast. We might think, as the
traditional commentators often think, that we can trust Mengzis accounts
and the accounts of key topics from the Four Books as indicators of Confuciuss views. My own approach is to look for differences, and moreover,
to be reluctant to attribute a view to the Confucius of the Analects without
sufficient textual evidence to warrant it. Moreover, because we know that
the Analects is authored by various writers and that the direct connection
Fingarette on Handshaking
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238
They also wish their own success to be harmonized with the success of their
people. But whether this passage supports any notion of mutual respect is
not clear. Nevertheless, lets suppose that it does. And if we do suppose that
it does, then by using these passages, we could construct something like the
following argument in favor of Fingarettes claim:
I.
II.
V.
Fingarette on Handshaking
239
Non-Reciprocal Bonds
David Nivisons argument that the practice of (shu) is a practice primarily and for the most part of superiors toward subordinates, comes from his
reading of the variety of passages in the Analects connected to (shu) and
to the related negative golden rule: ...what a person does not desire to
happen to himself, he should not impose on others (Analects 12.2). Rather
than discuss each passage Nivison discusses, I will offer just one such passage
to exemplify his approach. Consider Analects 12.2.
..,..
......
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Fingarette on Handshaking
241
of her is not offensive to her. I need not wonder what I would desire done
to me if she or someone else were to employ me as a cleaner. There is no
need to identify likening oneself to others as imagining reversing roles, even
though imagining this might be an instance of showing sensitivity.
Although I have argued that role reversal is not necessary for likening
oneself to others, I would also argue that in any case where a role-reversal
thought experiment causes one person to reject imposing a requirement
on others, it does not follow from the result of this experiment that such
reasoning supports any claim on the other persons conduct that involves
reciprocity. The role-reversal thought experiment puts me in a position to
test my reactions to see whether they are consistent.
Suppose, however, in a particular case, that I liken myself to others
by imaginatively reversing roles. How might this reasoning express reciprocity? Suppose I, a father, ask whether I would want to be treated as I
treat my son in the context in which my sons conduct has almost always
been exemplary, he has often gone beyond standard expectations of filial
duty to benefit me, and both he and I understand this. In such a case,
the father could reason that if he were the son, he would want his father
to go beyond the normal requirements of fathers to be considerate toward
their sons. This reasoning rests on an ideal of reciprocity. I decide that if
I were the son in this case, I would reasonably hope and expect that my
father would reciprocate by benefiting mein ways that would grant me
privileges or material goods that I believe I have earnedin response to
my earlier supererogatory act benefiting him.
A requirement of reciprocity between father and son would, for example, be the requirement that the father liken himself to his son, who has
importantly benefited him in ways that matter to the father, and thereby
the son feels justified in desiring that the father not impose on him and
thereby not imposing benefit him in this way. Role-reversibility thought
experiments can incorporate factors that would support reasoning about
reciprocity, but this sort of reasoning would seem to be a special case of
role-reversal thought experiments.
Another approach might argue that the father-son relationship is a
version of a benefactor-beneficiary relationship and that the negative golden
rule, not to impose on others (subordinates) what one would not want
imposed on oneself if one were a subordinate, involves reciprocity in the
following way: Superiors both benefit and make demands on subordinates,
but superiors also benefit from their subordinates. Benefit goes in both directions. Whenever one person in the relationship benefits, the other person
becomes indebted to that person. When both benefit, even if in different
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ways, both parties become indebted to the other party. But superiors might
be in a special position of being able to demand repayment and of being
able to regulate their conduct so as to achieve a proper balance between
demands and benefits. So even if the negative golden rule governs conduct
and reflection of superiors, it still is a reflection in the name of reciprocity,
a balance of benefits and requirements in the relationship. But if this were
the case, it would require specification of the meaning of the golden rule
beyond what the text offers. I conclude from these considerations that,
although the negative golden rule could get articulated in terms of some
principle of reciprocity, the Analects does not offer us such a version.
If these arguments are correct, what impact would they have on the
argument that I offered above for the claim that co-participant, face-to-face
rituals involve mutual respect? I repeat the argument and comment on it
below.
I.
VII.
Rituals expressive of (ren) are typically (and
paradigmatically) face-to-face rituals.
Fingarette on Handshaking
243
Based on this argument, we must first of all reject premise II. Premise II
would be true only if the requirement of (shu) did not admit of the sort
of positional differentiation in a hierarchy that it seems to presuppose. Also
premise IX would have to be rejected. Even if we accept the golden rule as a
general principle that applies to everyone, not just to those in a superior position, the golden rule requirement is not a principle of reciprocity. It does not
require you to be considerate toward me because I am considerate toward you.
I conclude from this analysis that Fingarettes view that ritual involves
reciprocal and mutual respect, no matter how initially plausible that might
be for handshakingand I have earlier argued against even this claimdoes
not even apply to Confuciuss practice and reflection on ritual.
Despite these clear differences from Fingarettes understanding of ritual, Nivison, whose views have influenced my own, nevertheless, seems to
endorse Fingarettes general approach to ritual ( li). Nivison says:
Li involve countless gestures and acts that, whether required or
simply available to me, serve as signals to you and invite response
from you in such a way as to reassure both of us that you and I
are a we; and, of course it serves this function most effectively
when these acts are expected and traditional.33
But the important qualification to stress, which follows from Nivisons
account but that he does not himself stress, is that not all acts of ritual (
li) involve (shu). A superiors performance of ritual toward a subordinate
requires (shu) without the subordinate being under the same requirement.
Instead, the subordinate is required to treat his superior with (zhong)
(good faith or loyalty). And even if we accept Fingarettes translation of
(shu) as reciprocal respect, we are forced to conclude from these arguments
that not all performances of ritual (li) require reciprocal respect, for the
requirement of (shu) governs only a superiors treatment of a subordinate.
From my point of view, the Analects is even more interesting for this
result. One might think that if we cannot find egalitarian commitments in
the Analects, it will be difficult to see this texts relevance for contemporary
Western ethical reflection. Indeed, one might even think that my analysis
commits us to relegating the Analects to the ethical graveyard. But this is
not the goal of my analysis, and I would like to end by offering an alternative appraisal.
If Nivison is right about (shu) but also right in thinking that traditional rituals (li) function to assure us that we are a we, we should
look for a mutuality in the Analects that involves moral division of labor.
We become a we not through (shu) practices alone, but also through
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Fingarette on Handshaking
245
A Wittgensteinian Diagnosis
I have argued that Fingarettes description of handshaking ignores crucial
distinctions we are all inclined to draw about handshaking. He runs together
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Fingarette on Handshaking
247
So the Wittgensteinian point I wish to make here is just that rituals are a motley. In some contexts, rituals express mutual respect; in other
contexts, they do not. And the latter are not deficient for not expressing
mutual respect. In some cases, even rituals that typically express mutual
respect can express other feelings or views: openness to further conversation, for example. Again, the latter are not deficient. Some authentic ritual
expressions of mutual respect are awkward. They dont just spontaneously
happen themselves, but they express respect anyway. Awkward expressions
of mutual respect might be deficient in poise but not necessarily deficient
in terms of what they express.
One might think that this diagnosis goes too far in the direction of
detaching ritual from the sort of essential ideal that Confucius and his supporters must endorse. After all, if ritual lacks a single essential ideal, how
can it play a central role in an account of ethics? I have been arguing that
it is hard to find such an ideal in the Analects. Instead, Confucius operates
by invoking dao-constitutive ideals of various sorts, understood in ways that
will help his interlocutor(s) improve their conduct and reflection. He offers
piecemeal interventions, not systematic theories.
Furthermore, it is possible to articulate an Analects-inspired worry
about Fingarettes account of ritual, one that arises out of Confuciuss project
of ethical intervention. Key to Confuciuss project is his refusal to engage
in abstract reflection that is not grounded in learning and practice. One
danger of abstract reflection not grounded in practice and learning is that it
offers a confused account of ritual that impairs practice and reflection. If we
think that all rituals express mutual respect, we are likely to feel confused
about rituals such as marriage and genuflection. If we think that authentic
rituals are spontaneous, we may feel a need to try to make the ritual of
swearing on the Bible in court spontaneous. If we think the ritual has to
happen spontaneously, we may not see the need to intervene thoughtfully to
help our ritual co-participants recover from awkward enactments of ritual.39
Confuciuss interventions are designed to help to promote a rich and
complex grasp of how to develop the virtues key to sustaining the variety of
relationships we find ourselves in. Mastery of ritual is central to his vision,
but he does not offer and would find problematic a narrow philosophical
account of ritual that has the potential to cause confusion and impede
actual practice of ritual.
There is, however, a deeper problem with Fingarettes account of Confuciuss basic insight: Human life in its entirety finally appears as one vast,
spontaneous and Holy Rite: the community of man. This, for Confucius,
was indeed an ultimate concern; it was, he said, again and again, the only
thing that mattered more than the individuals life itself (3:17, 4:5, 6:8).40
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Fingarette on Handshaking
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Introduction
In Chapter 8, I argued that Fingarettes account of handshaking in the Analects offers Westerners a striking example and helpful start at thinking about
the phenomenology of handshaking, as it provides the outlines, though in
places mistaken, of ritual interactions. I offered a diagnosis of the problems
in his account of ritual and the related phenomenology of handshaking.
In this chapter, I turn to Erving Goffmans sociology of ritual interaction
as a way of broadening and correcting Fingarettes account of ritual and
providing an analytical tool for helping us acknowledge the role of ritual
and its ethical significance in everyday interactions. Using the example of
handshaking, I take up the theme of this discussion on ritual: the human
need for acknowledgment. I argue that when thinking about the problem
of ritual, a topic discussed frequently by Confucius, from a contemporary
Western, philosophical perspective, what we need first is a strategy for bringing about an acknowledgment of ritual as central to our human form of
life and to any adequate account of living well.
In the first section of this chapter, I turn to sociologist Goffmans
taxonomy of ritual as a way to produce a perspicuous overview of ritual
in everyday life. In the second section, I draw out the implications of
this taxonomy for Fingarettes account of ritual. In the third section, I use
this taxonomy to offer examples of everyday ritual designed to supplement
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Fingarettes handshaking example and to offer counterexamples to his narrow account. The function of this sort of overview, the demand for which
I borrow from Wittgenstein, indicates the type of account of ritual I wish
to offer: This sort of overview is designed to clarify basic features of an
often overlooked but familiar set of features of human life along with the
concepts that play a central role it. In this case, a further goal is to foster
acknowledgmentespecially by philosophersof ritual as a basic, important feature of our moral life.
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at the same time the greatest good is in communion with others.13 This
formulation is reminiscent of Kants second formulation of the Categorical
Imperative: Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your
own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an
end and never merely as a means to an end. Goffman bases his view of
the human personality as sacred on his phenomenology of the meaning of
everyday, ritualized, face-saving practices. At their most general, everyday
ritual practices exhibit the demand to show regard for others in face-to-face
encounters. But beyond offering this most general characterization, Goffman
analyzes the variety of norms and ideals at play in these encounters, adherence to which constitutes what is required in various contexts to show proper
regard for others. In the two opening essays of Interaction Ritual alone, his
discussion of ritual runs the gamut from self-respect and pride,14 honor,15
dignity,16 considerateness,17 shamelessness,18 malice and spitefulness,19 disgrace,20 forgiveness and gratitude,21 to discretion, sincerity, modesty, and
self-control.22 Interaction rituals are indeed embodiments of a complex of
moral norms.
In his book Behavior in Public Places, Goffman offers an account of
the norms we operate under in our behavior in public places.23 I will begin
by reproducing Goffmans sketch of the interaction order and then will turn
to some examples [of my own], their significance, and why they deserve the
attention of ethicists and non-ethicists alike.
Goffman analyzes what he refers to as one kind of social order, where
he understands a social order to be the consequence of any set of moral
norms that regulates the way a person pursues objectives.24 Each such order
comes with its set of regulations. The order that Goffman is concerned with,
what he calls elsewhere the interaction order, is the order of a persons
handling of himself and others, during, and by virtue of, his immediate
physical presence among them; what is called face-to-face or immediate
interaction.25 Goffmans interaction order applies to any gathering of two
or more persons.
In the context of co-presence, based on bodily presence, each person
immediately gives off information to those with whom he is co-present and
receives information from them.26 As a result, each person can see the other
and can perceive how he is being seen or reacted to by the other person;
these perceptions amount to undeniable evidence about each persons comportment in the situation. Gatherings of this sort are sometimes also called
social occasions or a wider social affair, undertaking, or event bounded
in regard to place and time and typically facilitated by fixed equipment.27
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This taxonomy points to the extent and variety of encounters that are
occasions for ritual interactions. It is important, for our consideration, that
social gatherings are pervasive features of our lives. Unless we live alone and
stay inside day in and day out, we cannot avoid them. Moreover, gatherings
are various in character, and so behaviors or rituals that are fitting for one,
for example, a picnic, would be wholly unfitting for a funeral.
Goffman, however, further distinguishes between the situated and
the situational. The merely situated is what might happen to take place
in certain settings but could take place elsewhere. For example, I can read
a book in a library as well as outside it. If I read it in the library, that act
is merely situated in the library. The situational, in contrast, is what can
only take place in a specific gathering. For example, borrowing a library
book is situational relative to the gathering of particular people in the
library and requires co-presence with required others in this setting.29 The
situational aspects of gatherings and their constitutive requirement of copresence are regulated by norms that are basically moral in character. And
although moral norms relating to physical safety and harm are the most
obvious ones governing such gatherings, there is also, as Goffman indicates,
another sort of norm, given less attention:
[W]hen persons are present to one another, they can function
not merely as physical instruments but also as communicative
ones. This possibility, no less than the physical one, is fateful for
everyone concerned and in every society appears to come under
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strict normative regulation, giving rise to a kind of communicative traffic order. The rules pertaining to this area of conduct I
shall call situational proprieties.30
This fatefulness for all persons and all societies is both pervasive and
inescapable, and moreover, fundamentally moral in character. And through
his phenomenology, Goffman helps us see why this inescapable aspect of
human life is worthy of our attention and analysis, despite the fact that
this realm constitutes only a part of the moral order.31
In the course of his detailed study, Goffman offers the following sketch
of key norms governing social gatherings. The general norm is not to draw
improperly on what one owes to the situation.32 Sub-rules include the
following:
Rules requiring that one make oneself ready for involvement in the
situation. (Being attentive, interested enough to be able to respond
to what comes up, and dressed appropriately so one can take on
whatever role comes ones way.)
Keeping oneself from going too far in a situated task and so remaining ready to do what is required in the situation. (Not becoming so
absorbed in pouring drinks and helping the cook that one forgets
to greet new guests at a dinner party.)
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the rules are fairly tight. Of course, at a party, a person need not talk to
everyone. And there is some flexibility within the requirements on how a
partygoer could move through the evening, avoiding some conversations
and keeping others short.
Some gatherings are much looser in structure. For example, the gathering at a picnic allows for considerable flexibility in terms of what counts
as appropriate involvement.34 But in different communities, even in one
and the same nation, the level of looseness versus tightness of requirements
can vary greatly. Consider the different conventions concerning dress and
conduct by faculty and students in a lecture hall at a small college in the
South and one in a large California university situated near the ocean.
This list of rules demarcates a rough account of the regulations we
are under in the co-presence of others. Of course, different sub-rules will
apply in different situations. Handshaking takes place in various types of
gatherings and, depending on the type of gathering, will proceed differently;
in some gatherings, handshaking would seem abnormal. Fundamental to
these rules governing face-to-face encounters at gatherings is respect for
the gathering and its participants demonstrated by a persons readiness to
participate appropriately.
Beyond spelling out such general rules, Goffman analyzes the ways
in which a persons behavior in gatherings is ritualized. Goffmans work is
most clearly relevant to Confuciuss teaching in forcing us to acknowledge
its range in everyday life and the variety of ways ritual matters to us.35
In his essays in Interaction Ritual, where he develops his Durkheimian account of the role of ritual in face-to-face encounters,36 Goffman distinguishes between substantive rules governing interpersonal relations and
ceremonial rules. Substantive rules are rules governing conduct that prescribe
or prohibit conduct for its own sake. For example, there is a substantive
rule against stealing that rules out taking others property without right, no
matter how a person ritually conducts the theft. This sort of rule lines up
with Confuciuss notion of justice or righteousness ( yi), which can be
used to specify duties. In contrast, ceremonial rules govern how a person
expresses his character or expresses his appreciation of others in the situation.37 Goffman makes the point that the ceremonial rule governs the
ceremonial component or function of an action, not the action itself.
Thus any action might have a substantive component as well as a ceremonial component.38 I might violate a substantive rule of property by robbing
a bank, but I might conduct myself in a way that showed concern and
respect toward the teller, following our cultures ceremonial rule of being
polite to strangers.
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argues that this way of speaking about authenticity is really just a part of
the performance of a self. I use my capacity to shake hands smoothly and
the talk of smooth handshaking as a way of making my performance all
the more convincing. But Goffman adds that while this way of speaking
provides a strength of show, it provides a poor analysis of it. Crucial to
a correct analysis is the way in which performances are structured and are
convincing, the syntax of talk about the difference between an authentic
and contrived self.49
Another important feature of Goffmans account that bears on Fingarettes analysis of ritual is the way in which he characterizes the rules of
ritual as ways of expressing regard for others a person encounters. If we
distinguish between regard and respect, we might then want to say the following: ritual requirements of demeanor and deference are ways of expressing regard for others a person encounters in gatherings. But if we think of
respect as involving the acknowledgment of achievement or position in
some hierarchy, then social ritual requires that we demonstrate regard for
those we encounter, even if we do not respect them for their achievements
or position in a hierarchy. If this account is correct, and it needs further
study, then Fingarettes account confuses respect with regard and gives
too much weight to the respect-expressing role of rituals.50 This role, strictly
speaking, is limited to rituals of a certain sort. Of course, this critique
depends on clarifying the distinction between regard and respect, and I
have not tried to do that fully here. But this basic distinction between a
general requirement of showing consideration (regard) for others a person
encounters versus respecting them for their achievements and positions in
a hierarchy is one that we can also find in the Analects distinction between
(shu) (reciprocal regard) and (jing) (respect), discussed in Chapter 8.
A final issue that Goffmans taxonomy raises in general, as well as for
Fingarettes account, is the relationship between substantive rules governing
interpersonal relations and ceremonial rules. Substantive rules, such as, Do
not steal, govern interpersonal relations independent of face-to-face encounters. But Goffman never addresses the question of the relation between
substantive and ceremonial rules within the commerce of human life. We
can admit the distinction, and we can also ask this question: In which
way would our understanding of either type of rule be affected were we
the sorts of beings who operated exclusively with substantive or ceremonial
rules? I would venture that each of these two aspects of morality provides
a context for understanding the other. Ritually expressed regard for others
has to impact individuals sense of why stealing is wrong and affects their
motivation for not stealing, just as the acknowledgment of substantive rules
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Conclusion
Understanding the full range of proprieties for the wide range of gatherings
in which people find themselves requires the mastery of a wide range of rules
and the development of a fairly complicated repertoire of behaviors. Until
very recently, even in North America, it was thought that young people
needed to read etiquette manuals to help them master this knowledge.51 That
approach has tended to fall out of favor. One might speculate that this is
because of the increasing tendency for gatherings and relationships that used
to be more tightly governed to be increasingly more loosely governed. Note
the recent trend among students on college campuses to address teachers
by their first names or the tendency to dress informally for class, whereas
in the 1950s both of these behaviors were unheard of.
When we combine this North American trend toward social informality, which I am by no means arguing against, with the tendency to
understand norms governing social behavior as either individually chosen or
validated or as being constituted exclusively by what Goffman calls substantive rules, then the realm of ritual norms that govern social gatherings tends
to suffer from individual and cultural inattention and distortion, though
these ritual norms have not disappeared.
At the most abstract level, this cultural trend, supported by philosophical theories as well as the trend toward informality, can lead to the
ease with which it becomes possible to deny the existence of this realm of
interpersonal normativity or to see it as outside the bounds of morality. If
Goffmans taxonomy is basically correct and if our moral sensibility cannot
be separated from our ritualized expression of regard for others, we live at
a cultural moment in which we cannot help but acknowledge the fact and
meaning of ritual interactions, but we lack the philosophical and cultural
resources to understand them. I have argued that Fingarettes handshaking
example helps us to acknowledge the moral character of ritual. But we also
need to think seriously about other types of examples of ritual.
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quite knowing how to make the appropriate spatial adjustment when the
elevator starts to get full) might be understandable and deserving of special
appreciation by co-riders because of the way it shows consideration for them.
This example brings to the fore an important feature of some, but
not all, everyday negative rituals. They are structured to show consideration
for others. But consideration can be shown in ways that go beyond being
present, showing respect and intimacy, and so forth. People need to be
perceptive and to have developed sensitivity toward the legitimate needs of
others in the variety of contexts in which they are present to each other.
They can also show consideration by avoiding contact or interaction with
those in their presence.
Central to negative rituals, then, is what a person avoids doing as a
way of showing consideration for others. But this aspect of rituals, avoidances that show consideration for others in ones presence, also results in
requirements that ritual actors satisfy situational requirements of demeanor.
The ritual requirements of demeanor include requirements for avoiding conduct, including dress, which would undermine the persons capacity to fulfill
other ritual requirements in the situation. They are ritualized ways of being
prepared for participation in other rituals. So, even if greeting a guest is a
way of my welcoming her to my party, trying to make her feel comfortable,
and creating ritualized beginning of party-type interactions, my demeanor
alone does not guarantee that a guest will feel comfortable or welcome. The
demeanor of showing consideration for all guests, while necessary, does not
complete my ritual requirements as a host.
Other things being equal, to show proper demeanor in a situation
is to satisfy a necessary condition of successful ritual engagement in that
situation. If I am to show proper demeanor as a host of a cocktail party for
professional colleagues at my home, I must be available to greet guests, not
be wearing a swimsuit, and not be needing a bath. I have to show demeanor
appropriate to the context as a mode of expressing consideration for my
guests. Of course, we can imagine all sorts of justifying exceptions to this
requirement. If my car had broken down and I arrived home from the beach
and show up for the party just as my guests are arriving, my lateness, along
with my frazzled state of mind, swimsuit, and dirtiness could be excused.
Showing proper demeanor in a context is just a part of the ritual
activity of the context. That is to say, showing proper demeanor in a context
qualifies people to carry out their ritual responsibilities in that context. But
being properly behaved is a way of showing those with whom individuals
come into ritual contact that they are trustworthy, considerate co-participants. As guest, I would not feel comfortable being greeted by and greeting
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the rest of the patients witnessing it, designed both to show disrespect for
authority and solidarity amongst the patientsthe more this seems a ritual
act. Furthermore, if there were specific sorts of occasions in which this ritual
were performed by patients occupying specific roles, such as patient leaders,
that fact would strengthen the case for thinking of this gesture as a ritual
act. So it seems reasonable to think that there are rituals of contempt.57
We can also think of other such rituals. I might, for example, refuse
to shake hands with someone. This can be a ritual, too. And in specific
contexts, we can easily see such a refusal as more than just a gesture. When
the leader of Israel refuses to shake hands with the leader of Egypt, we are
witnessing a ritual of expressing and sustaining a lack of respect and a desire
to maintain diplomatic distance.
One might think that this example is not only a problem for Fingarettes account of ritual, but also for Confuciuss account. However, I have
already argued that for Confucius ritual does not necessarily express respect.
Furthermore, the Analects offers an example of a show of contempt:
. . . . .
Rubei wanted an audience with Confucius. Confucius refused him
by [using] the excuse of being sick. As the messenger was going
out the door, he sang, having fetched his se [a musical instrument] to play, deliberately causing the messenger to hear this.58
Here we have an example of intentional slight. We can imagine it as a
ritual act or as the exemplar that begins a tradition. This example shows
that Confucius was not beneath expressing contempt. And we can imagine
it as becoming a ritual means of doing so even if not so here. But we also
find this example of a negative ritual, one that operates ritually by refusing
to do the recognized ritual of respect as a way of showing disrespect:
. . .
Toward friends presenting gifts, even though it is as expensive
as a carriage or a yoke of horses, but is not sacrificial meat, he
wont pay his respects.59
This example shows a refusal to engage in the accepted ritual response to a
gift. But, as in the refusal to shake hands, the refusal to pay respect for a
gift can be a ritualized way to show disrespect. Even for Confucius, there
270
Afterword
272
Afterword
273
274
Notes
Preface
1. Note to readers: Throughout this book, I have made an effort to avoid
sexist use of pronouns. When possible, I have used the general strategy of using
third person singular neutral pronouns and neutral plural pronouns. In quoted texts,
I have used the pronouns present in those texts to guard authenticity. Despite these
efforts, some sentences remain with he, which I use as a neutral pronoun because
it is less awkward than any other alternatives I considered.
Chapter 1
1. From Philip J. Ivanhoes appendix to Ethics in the Confucian Tradition.
See note 4 below.
2. I agree with Richard Grandy that our interpretive goal should be intelligibility, including intelligible error, not correctness of a view at any cost. See his article,
Reference, Meaning, and Belief The Journal of Philosophy 70, no. 14 (1973):
439452. For an extended discussion of the principle of charity, see Chapter 4.
3. For two examples of such an approach, see Paul Johnston, The Contradictions of Modern Moral Philosophy: Ethics After Wittgenstein, Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory (London: Routledge, 1999); and Paul Johnston, Wittgenstein
and Moral Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1989).
4. For a set of representative views that offer this approach, with an overview by the editors, see Alice Crary and Rupert J. Read, eds., The New Wittgenstein
(London: Routledge, 2000). For my own account of Wittgensteins philosophical
therapy, see James F. Peterman, Philosophy as Therapy: An Interpretation and Defense
of Wittgensteins Later Philosophical Project, SUNY Series in Philosophy and Psychotherapy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: The German Text, with
a Revised English Translation, 4th ed., trans. and ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M.
S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, [1953] 2009),
section 654.
275
276
Notes to Chapter 1
6. The text on this notion, like much of the rest of the text, offers fragments of insights, not a complete account of the need to clarify and enforce correct
usage. However, some commentators have thought that the account should be seen
as applying to the whole of language. See John Makeham, The Earliest Extant
Commentary on Lunyu: Lunyu Zheng shi zhu, Toung Pao 83 (1997).
7. For an account of the relationship between Confuciuss and Youzis views,
see William A. Haines, The Purloined Philosopher: Youzi on Learning by Virtue,
Philosophy East and West 58, no. 4 (2008): 47091.
8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgensteins Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge, 1939: From the Notes of R. G. Bosanquet, Norman Malcolm,
Rush Rhees, and Yorick Smythies, ed. Cora Diamond (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1976), 14.
9. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 23940.
10. In comments on an early version of my argument, Yang Xiao pointed
out the difficulty of understanding Confucius as being interested in the learning of
children and the difficulty of likening Confuciuss view of learning with Wittgensteins. However, since Wittgensteins focus on learning contexts includes learning
by adults as well as by children of various ages, there should be no difficulty in
likening these different approaches, as I do in this book.
11. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 217.
12. Alasdair MacIntyre, Incommensurability, Truth, and the Conversation
Between Confucians and Aristotelians About the Virtues, in Culture and Modernity:
East-West Philosophic Perspectives, ed. Eliot Deutsch (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1991), 104122.
13. Edward Slingerland, Virtue Ethics, the Analects, and the Problem of
Commensurability, Journal of Religious Ethics 29, no. 1 (2001): 97125.
14. David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking Through Confucius, SUNY
Series in Systematic Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987);
David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking from the Han: Self, Truth, and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1998).
15. Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (Religious Traditions
of the World) (Long Grove, IL.: Waveland Press, [1972] 1998).
16. A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient
China (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989).
17. Chad Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
18. Benjamin I. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press, 1985).
19. Robert Eno, The Confucian Creation of Heaven: Philosophy and the Defense
of Ritual Mastery, SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1989).
20. David S. Nivison, The Ways of Confucianism (Peru, IL: Open Court,
1996).
Notes to Chapter 1
277
278
Notes to Chapter 1
37. See Wittgenstein, On Certainty, section 263, for his description of the
normal schoolboy. This account of the deviant student comes at section 310 ff.
38. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, sections 31417.
39. Williams, Wittgenstein, Mind, and Meaning, 17980.
40. Ibid., 17980.
41. See note 23 and related text from this chapter.
42. I adopt this translation for the following reason: Although translators
have offered different translations into English of (ren), they all seem somewhat
problematic to me. (ren) seems to encompass all of those virtues that govern
interpersonal relationships. I select moral goodness because it seems to me to
capture many of our most basic intuitions about what it would be for a person to
be (ren). My translations also tend to understand the general virtue of (ren),
as well as the specific virtues that make it up, like (xiao) in terms of practices.
So I translate (xiao) as practicing or being filial. This reflects my understanding
of the practical focus of early Chinese texts, especially the Analects.
43. Youzi, quoted in Confucius, Analects, 1.2.
44. Confucius, Analects, 12.1.
45. Confucius, Analects, 2.15.
46. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, sections 123 and 309.
47. I am grateful to Yang Xiaos and Meredith Williamss comments on an
earlier version of this argument, along with various audience members in the International Society of Comparative and Western Philosophy group session at the 2009
Eastern American Philosophical Association meeting, who raised this point and
indicated possible resolutions.
48. This paragraph was added as a result of P. J. Ivanhoes perceptive comments on this issue.
49. Source text: Jiang Yihua , Huang Junlang .
. (Taipei: , 2007). From Inner Pattern, Liji, section 7 and translation
from James Legge, Li Ki, vol. 28, part 4, Sacred Books of the East (Oxford, UK:
Clarendon Press, 1885).
50. Ibid., sections 7680.
51. Wittgenstein, Wittgensteins Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, 14.
52. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 217.
53. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, sections 9495.
54. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 236.
55. See Philosophical Investigations, 23637, where Wittgenstein makes this
distinction in reference to methods of measuring length.
56. Ibid., section 227.
57. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 237.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid., 239.
60. Confucius, Analects, 9.11.
61. Confucius, Analects, 2.4.
Notes to Chapter 1
279
62. E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks, The Original Analects: Sayings of
Confucius and His Successors, 04790249 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1997), 53.
63. Edward Slingerland, Confucius Analects: With Selections from Traditional
Commentaries, translated by Edward Slingerland (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 90.
For a discussion of two different ways of interpreting this passage, exhibited in the
commentarial tradition, see Daniel K. Gardner, Zhu Xis Reading of the Analects:
Canon, Commentary, and the Classical Traditin (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2003), 14954. For my account of how to address such conflicts in interpretation, see Chapter 3.
64. See Confucius, Analects 6.22 and 13.19 for the ren questions; 2.5, 2.6,
2.7, and 2.8 for the xiao questions.
65. Confucius, Analects, 7.8 for the fen and fei explanations.
66. Confucius, Analects, 5.9.
67. For Wittgensteins rejection of this sort of projection, see Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, section 1.
68. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 239.
69. Ibid., section 240.
70. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, section 203.
71. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 241.
72. Ibid., section 242.
73. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, VI, section
21.
74. Ibid., VI, section 2.
75. Ibid., VI, section 39.
76. Williams, Wittgenstein, Mind, and Meaning, 201.
77. Confucius, Analects, Youzi quoted in 1.12.
78. See Peterman, Philosophy as Therapy for a sustained discussion of this sort
of project in the writings of the later Wittgenstein.
79. Confucius, Analects, 13.23, on a junzi and dao.
80. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 236.
81. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, VI, sections
1718.
82. Ibid., VI, section 19.
83. I am indebted to P. J. Ivanhoe for this point. See his The Evolution of
the Chuanxilu in his Ethics in the Confucian Tradition: The Thought of Mengzi and
Wang Yangming. 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), 14353. Both Wang
and his disciple Xu Ai, the author of Chuanxilu, held the view that the examples
of Confuciuss teaching in the Analects were to be understood as aimed at each
individual and not as a general medicine for everyone. Nonetheless, despite Wangs
instruction not to do so, Xu Ai composed the Chuanxilu in order to offer examples
of Wangs instruction to individuals, as a way of giving the hints and suggestions
that would guide disciples on their own self-cultivation. This appendix offers a
280
Notes to Chapter 2
translation of the preface of Chuanxilu, which describes Wangs and Xus similar
approach to the Analects and to imponderable evidence that I offer here.
84. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 208.
85. Ibid., section 208.
86. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 126. Other aspects of
what lie open to us in such understanding are the settled, confident disposition to
carry on correctly and the related sense that one must carry on in this way.
87. Confucius, Analects, 7.24.
88. Confucius, Analects, 17.17.
89. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 64.
90. Ibid., section 66.
91. Ibid., ix.
92. James C. Klagge, An Unexplored Concept in Wittgenstein, History of
Philosophy Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1995): 46986.
93. Ibid., 472, quoting Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on
Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1972), 7.
94. Yang Xiao, How Confucius Does Things with Words: Two Hermeneutic
Paradigms in the Analects and Its Exegeses, The Journal of Asian Studies 66, no. 2
(2007): 497532.
95. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, sections 112 and 133.
Chapter 2
1. Rush Rhees, Some Developments in Wittgensteins View of Ethics, The
Philosophical Review 74, no. 1 (1965): 23.
2. For an account of the range of views of ethics that might count as antitheoretical, see Stanley G. Clarke and Evan Simpson, Anti-Theory in Ethics and
Moral Conservatism, SUNY Series in Ethical Theory (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1989). For an account of the anti-theoretical approach to ethics
by Wittgenstein, see James C. Edwards, Ethics Without Philosophy: Wittgenstein and
the Moral Life (Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1982).
3. Confucius, Analects, 2.16.
4. Ibid., 18.7
5. Ibid., 18.5.
6. For a development of this argument, see Chapter 3.
7. I avoided overstating my point here by a comment of P. J. Ivanhoe.
8. Confucius, Analects, 17.19.
9. I have excluded the second part of this section, which in some other
editions is relegated to a separate passage.
10. Part of Confuciuss resignationist approach to disagreement may be connected to his suspicion of clever speech (Analects 1.3), but also to his skepticism
about reflection not wedded to learning (Analects 2.15).
Notes to Chapter 2
281
282
Notes to Chapter 2
Notes to Chapter 2
283
philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no
longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question (133). And What
has to be accepted, the given, isone might sayforms of life (p. 238, section
345.). These quotes are expressions of what the realistic spirit cares about and the
form of philosophical clarifications it seeks to develop.
42. Harry G. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical
Essays (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
43. Ibid., 92.
44. Ibid., 83.
45. See Chapter 2, note 45 and related text.
46. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, sections 98 and 105.
47. I borrow this language from Philosophical Investigations, section 122.
48. Diamond, The Realistic Spirit, 2829.
49. Perhaps the best initial response to this dilemma is to reject it as begging
the question. After all, it assumes what is in question, that resolution of moral
disagreement requires appeal to clear principles set up in advance of confronting
the disagreement. Nevertheless, without clear, prior criteria of judgment to appeal
to, it might be hard to see how the realistic spirit can do anything but arbitrarily
manage moral disagreement.
50. It might, however, seem strange to appeal to the Confucian tradition
to help the realistic spirit address the problem of moral disagreement because the
Confucian tradition can never be anything more than one actual or possible party
to moral disputes. So my resolution to the realistic spirits problem of moral disagreement seems to amount to nothing more than arbitrarily selecting one moral
tradition over others as a way to resolve disagreement.
Despite this appearance, I would defend my approach as follows. The Confucian realistic spirit is not committed to its own moral vision, but rather to
embodying dao, whatever that requires. Its method of embodying dao depends on
recognition that whatever dao is, understanding it requires study of its embodiments
and reflection on those, based on the best resources at hand. Nothing precludes the
Confucian realistic spirit from adding to its collection of exemplars by introducing
exemplars from other times and cultures. To embody the Confucian realistic spirit
is to collect exemplars of dao, whatever those might be, and to use them in practice
and reflection on dao, whatever doing that might lead to, not to limit that collection
arbitrarily. The Confucian spirits collections provide resources for the realistic spirit
to manage disagreement without having to turn to moral theory.
51. Rush Rhees, Some Developments in Wittgensteins View of Ethics, The
Philosophical Review 74, no. 1 (1965): 23.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., 24.
55. Ibid., 2425.
56. Stephen Mulhall, Ethics in Light of Wittgenstein, Philosophical Papers
31, no. 3 (2002): 31314.
284
Notes to Chapter 3
Chapter 3
1. Daniel K. Gardner, Confucian Commentary and Chinese Intellectual
History, The Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 2 (1998): 397422.
2. John Makeham, Transmitters and Creators: Chinese Commentators and
Commentaries on the Analects, Harvard East Asian Monographs, 228 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Asia Center, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2003).
3. Ibid.
4. E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks, The Original Analects: Sayings of
Confucius and His Successors, 04790249 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1997).
5. Edward Slingerland, Why Philosophy Is Not Extra in Understanding
the Analects, Philosophy East and West 50, no. 1 (2000): 13741.
6. Although I develop my own arguments here and focus specifically on
the two texts under discussion, my general approach to these questions of meaning
and interpretation is in sympathy with the approach and arguments of Bryan Van
Norden in his Introduction to Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese
Philosophy. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
7. Translation A from Chichung Huang, The Analects of Confucius: A Literal
Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) and translation B from D.
C. Lau, Confucius: The Analects, London Penguin Books, 1979.
Notes to Chapter 3
285
286
Notes to Chapter 3
32. H. G. Creel, whose views I discuss below, thinks that the Analects gives
us the real Confucius. He, nevertheless, admits that the Analects represents the
writings of Confuciuss disciples. See Herrlee G. Creel, Confucius: The Man and the
Myth (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), 291. See Harold Shadick, Review
of Confucius by H. G. Creel, The Philosophical Review (1951): 11317, for a
discussion of problems with Creels account.
33. See, for example, Annping Chin, The Authentic Confucius: A Life of
Thought and Politics (New York: Scribners, 2007), who assumes without argument
that the Analects can be taken as authentic.
34. Herrlee G. Creel, Confucius and the Chinese Way (New York: Harper,
1960).
35. Ibid., xi.
36. Ibid., xi and 62.
37. Creel, Confucius and the Chinese Way, 58.
38. Ibid., 61.
39. Ibid., 6162.
40. Ibid., 60.
41. Ibid., 123.
42. Ibid., 132.
43. Ibid., 155.
44. Ibid., 115, 122, 125, 169, and 258.
45. Creel, Confucius and the Chinese Way, 133, 136.
46. Ibid., 136.
47. Michael Nylan, The Five Confucian Classics (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2001), 364.
48. I owe this point to Philip J. Ivanhoe.
49. For an account of the recent history of rejection of the need to develop
an historical account of Socratess life in order to develop an account of Socratess
views, see Debra Nails, Socrates, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed.
Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2007).
50. In thinking about this issue, I have been influenced by Alexander Nehemass account of Nietzsche in his book, Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche, Life as
Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) in which he argues
that the main character of many of Nietzsches texts, himself, is not the same as
Nietzsche the writer. Nietzsche invented a literary philosophical version of himself as
the angry destroyer of what he took to be traditional idols and critic of democratic
stupidity, the whole while being a shy, introverted, scholarly type. We can read the
Nietzsche corpus, focusing on understanding the character Nietzsche internal to the
Nietzsche corpus, just as we can read the Analects with the goal of understanding
the character Confucius.
51. Some passages treat (li) and (ren) as connected: 12.1; others as
disconnected: 12.2 and 12.3. I claim that this multiple author strategy is one way
to resolve the contradiction, not the only way.
Notes to Chapter 4
287
52. The Brookses argue for this interpretation, but think they can specify
the authors of these competing strains of thinking. I have denied that, but that
does not mean we cannot identify competing views of Confuciuss teaching in the
Analects. We dont need to know the authorship to have reason to suspect that there
exist such competing accounts.
53. John Makeham, Between Chen and Cai: Zhuangzi and the Analects, in
Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi, trans. Roger T. Ames (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1998), 9294. See also Jeffrey L Richeys use of this argument
in Jeffrey L. Richey, Ascetics and Aesthetics in the Analects, Numen (2000), 164.
54. For the source of this notion of family resemblance, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 64. See also Chapter 1 at note 86.
55. John Makeham, Transmitters and Creators, 20, note 47.
56. Ibid., 910.
57. Ibid., 13.
58. Ibid., 16.
Chapter 4
1. Following Frank Cioffis criticisms of Wittgensteins approach to anthropology, Brian Clack argues that Wittgensteins approach to understanding rituals of
other cultures suffers from the way in which it too easily resolves puzzlement over
foreign rituals by associating them with familiar rituals of our own. I reject this
criticism since it seems to identify some of Wittgensteins mistaken associations in
his Remarks on Frazers Golden Bough with adequate instances of his method.
See Brian R. Clack, Wittgenstein, Frazer, and Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999),
Chapter 4, Perspicuous Representation.
2.Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 115.
3.Ludwig Wittgenstein, Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical
Investigations,Generally Known as the Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 1.
4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: The German Text, With
a Revised English Translation, section 2.
5. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (New
York: Scribner, 1969), 52.
6. In his Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, (La Salle, IL: Open Court University of Chicago Press, 1990),
Stanley Cavell argues against Kripkes community agreement view of meaning. There
is more wrong with Cavells account than I can address here. He emphasizes that for
Wittgenstein, agreement in forms of life is just agreement in deep-seated tendencies
of response, not agreements about any specific judgment or response. The communitys agreement about a judgment, then, is not the sort of agreement that Wittgenstein has in mind. I discuss the question of the role of agreement in Wittgensteins
288
Notes to Chapter 4
Notes to Chapter 5
289
Chapter 5
1. In thinking about this principle of salience, I have benefited from the
important writings of Quentin Skinner. See James Tully, Meaning and Context:
Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1988).
2. The literature on Wittgensteins account of nonsense presents a range
of views on why Wittgenstein held that all of his propositions in his early work
lacked meaning. One view would hold that they lacked meaning because they do
not picture a set of possible facts. Another would hold that they lacked meaning
because certain of their signs had not been given a meaning. The former view, then,
has to cope with the question of whether Wittgenstein offers a picture theory of
290
Notes to Chapter 5
meaning, which he later abandons as nonsense, based on that theory itself. There
is a long history of thinking that the Tractatus is, for this reason, incoherent. The
latter view claims that he has no theory of meaning. He, instead, thinks, in some
ordinary, commonsense way, that in some cases we have given meaning to signs,
and in some cases we have not. However, he does not need to offer a theory of
meaning to support this view. He is just using our ordinary, non-theoretical concept
of meaning. For the former, see G. E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgensteins
Tractatus, 4th ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1971); for the latter, see Cora Diamonds
essay Criss-cross Philosophy in Erich Ammereller and Eugen Fisher, Wittgenstein
at Work: Method in the Philosophical Investigations (London: Routledge, 2004).
3. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, section 24.
4. See Stewart Cohen, Contextualism and Skepticism, Nos, 34, Philosophical Issues 10 (2000), for a discussion of contextual aspects of salience that
includes Dretskes example. Cohen argues that standards for knowing some claim to
be true depend on context and on whether a question has been raised and whether
an answer to the question really matters.
5. See Chapter 6, note 10 and related text for a discussion of commentary
on this text.
6. The notion of certain questions dropping away is central to Wittgensteins approach to philosophy in both his early and later periods. We might even
consider distinguishing between those questions that are basic by distinguishing (a)
which questions one can fruitfully address earlier (b) by virtue of which otherwise
abstruse, unanswerable questions, get dissolved. This approach to Confucius would
bring the two projects together more clearly than my present discussion would
indicate. Another possibility, however, is that once a person learns the rituals that
pertain to spirits, he need only then reflect on these rituals meanings. I do not
try to resolve this difference here as both seem consistent with the Analects and
both seem possible strategies for addressing a Zilu-type question. Philip J. Ivanhoe
offers the first sort of interpretation of this passage in Death and Dying in the
Analects, in Amy Olberding and Philip J. Ivanhoe, eds., Mortality in Traditional
Chinese Thought (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011).
7. Donald J. Munro, The Concept of Man in Early China (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1979), 55.
8. Ibid., 56.
9. Munro, Concept of Man, 54.
10. Ibid.
11. Chad Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 1992), 3.
12. There is no reason to think that there is a Western view of language. Is
early Wittgensteins language Western? Is Nietzsches? Is later Wittgensteins?
13. Hansen, A Daoist Theory, 34.
14. Ibid., 65.
15. Following Legge.
16. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 43.
Notes to Chapter 5
291
292
Notes to Chapter 5
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., 145.
46. I am not arguing that it would be impossible to supply such a theory. Based on Analects 13.23, one might be able to generate such an account:
... Toward others, an exemplary person (junzi)
is harmonious but not always in agreement, while a petty man intends to casually
agree with others but without harmony. My main points here are simply that the
view would not be consequentialist, and Confucius does not seem interested in
developing such views.
47. See my discussion of this point in Chapter 1.
48. Wittgensteins relation to pragmatism has been recently explored by Russell Goodman. The account of Wittgensteins ambivalence toward pragmatism is
complicated, but for present purposes, it is worth mentioning that Wittgensteins
identification of meaning with use did not for him amount to an identification of
truth with usefulness of beliefs. See Russell B. Goodman, Wittgenstein and William
James (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 158. For Wittgensteins
comment on pragmatism, see Wittgenstein, On Certainty, section 422. In Remarks
on Philosophical Psychology, Wittgenstein makes his opposition to pragmatism clear
when he says that he is not saying a proposition is true if it is useful (Part 1,
section 266).
49. Yang Xiao, How Confucius Does Things with Words: Two Hermeneutic
Paradigms in the Analects and Its Exegeses, The Journal of Asian Studies 66, no. 2
(2007): 497532.
50. Xiao, How Confucius, 502, n.7
51. Ibid., 501.
52. Ibid.
53. Either might work as a translation, but I would like to propose that
mine is better in that it captures this pervasive feature of these sorts of questions
to Confucius. Moreover, it captures a pervasive feature of Confuciuss responses. In
this particular passage, the translation is complicated by the follow-up questions by
Gongxi Hua. But there is no need to mistranslate the first part of the passage, which
reports these earlier conversations, with Gongxi Huas misunderstanding of them.
54. I am still using Xiaos translation here, but I have dropped his interpolation of with these words at the end of each sentence. He needs this interpolation to support his speech act interpretation of the passage, but the text does not
contain these phrases.
55. For Confuciuss account of his own stages of deepening his understanding
of dao, see Analects 2.4.
56. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, throughout.
57. Ibid., section 204.
58. See Chapter 1 for a discussion of the age of Wittgensteins and Confuciuss novices and the question of what counts as a background practice being
taught to a novice.
59. Wittgenstein, On Certainty.
Notes to Chapter 6
293
60. This weakness seems to show in various passages, among them Analects
17.21 and 18.67. In these passages, arguments might seem necessary to refute challenges, but arguments are lacking or not well developed. But this is as we should
expect if Confucius understands these failures of understanding to first require a
change in practice.
61. Xiao, How Confucius, 510.
62. Although I dont argue for this claim here, I suspect that any account
that does not attribute truth claims to Confucius will reduce to some form of ethical non-cognitivism. Although articulating this view in some of its forms might
be funMourn for three years. Rah! Two years. Boo!this attribution would
be uncharitable.
Chapter 6
1. I borrowed this title from D. L. Hall and R. T. Ames, Getting It Right:
On Saving Confucius from the Confucians. Philosophy East & West 34, no. 1
(1984): 323. Although the authors and I agree that Confucius needs saving, our
analysis of why differs. For my commentary on their view, see Chapter 5, Hall
and Ames and the Pragmatic Reading of Chinese Philosophy.
2. For a detailed articulation of this view, see Kim-chong Chong, The
Practice of Jen, Philosophy East and West 49, no. 3 (1999).
3. Kwong-loi Shun, Jen and Li in the Analects, Philosophy East and West
43, no. 3 (1993): 45779.
4. Analects 12.2.
5. There is no reason to understand this passage as invoking a Daoist-like
mysticism. (See Arthur Waley, The Analects of Confucius, New York: Vintage Books,
1989, 3839.) We might suppose, instead, that Confucius is at a higher stage of
mastery of the complex skills and practices involved in the dao. Yan Hui is at a lower
stage, but we dont know exactly how these stages work and what they are. What
Yan Hui offers us is an account, from the advanced novice perspective, of what it
is like to struggle at a stage lower than the most advanced stage. We should not,
however, take his account to be anything but an account from his advanced novice
stage of mastery. This view of the pedagogy required to get novices to advanced
levels of skill fits nicely with recent work on the stages of advancement on the way
toward mastery of complex, practical skills. See H. L. Dreyfus, A Five-Stage Model
of the Mental Activities Involved in Directed Skill Acquisition, Berkeley: University
of California, Operations Research Center, 1980.
6. Most translators translate (xue) as learn, except where context
demands study. Translators D. C. Lau, The Analects (Hong Kong: The Chinese
University Press, 2000); Arthur Waley, The Analects of Confucius (New York: Vintage Books, 1989); and Edward G. Slingerland, Confucius Analects: With Selections
from Traditional Commentaries (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub. Co, 2003) all reject
study as being overly intellectual. But Ames and Rosemont opt for study because,
294
Notes to Chapter 6
they say, it is a process word, whereas learn is an achievement word, and, they
claim, the Analects offers a process view of the world. (See their Analects, p. 230).
But learn in its various forms is not always an achievement word. I am learning
Chinese itself can refer to a process.
7. For Philip J. Ivanhoes account of Confucian self-cultivation and its relation to learning, see his Rockwell lectures, P. J. Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral SelfCultivation, vol. 3, The Rockwell Lecture Series (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000),
especially Chapter 1. For an account of the forms of learning that Confucius and his
followers supported, see Robert Eno, The Confucian Creation of Heaven: Philosophy
and the Defense of Ritual Mastery. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 5263. For D. C. Laus account
of the close relation between learning and practice, see Lau (2000), xliii ff. Also see
Slingerland 2003 throughout, but especially his commentary to Analects 1.1 and his
glossary entry for learning on p. 239. For a detailed analysis of various passages
that support this approach, see Kim-chong Chong, The Practice of Jen, 1999.
8. Analects 15.31.
9. That Confucius holds that there is an important relationship between
words and practices should come as no surprise, given the emphasis he gives to
(zhengming), rectifying names, which at least articulates the requirement of
applying functional words, which invokes norms of the function they introduce
only to those instances that fulfill those norms. To devote oneself to those words
requires devotion to the associated norms and, so, to the practices they require.
But in the case of ethical terms, like both (ren) and (li), whose norms of
usage are connected to practices that embody those norms, devotion to words is
connected to devotion to practices.
10. See my comments on the supporting passage 9.1, which claims that Confucius seldom spoke of benefit, fate, or ren in Chapter 2 at note 131. Of course,
passage 5.13 has been variously interpreted. My reading here follows He Yan. For a
discussion of the history of interpretations of this passage, see P. J. Ivanhoe, Review:
Thinking Through Confucius by David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames. Philosophy East
and West 41, no. 2 (1991): 24154. Ivanhoe makes the point that commentaries
on the Analects reflect the variety of metaphysical commitments that commentators bring to that text. He concludes that translation will involve the philosophical
project of teasing out metaphysical views. My only addition to this argument, based
on my arguments in Chapter 4, would be to claim that we need also to interpret
and translate these texts in light of the strongest philosophical arguments for and
against these optional metaphysical views.
11. See D. Z. Phillips, Interventions in Ethics (London: Blackwell, 1992), viii.
12. This interest in exemplars of (ren) is no doubt connected to Confuciuss claim (7.22) that if he is among others, he can find models ( shi) among
them, both in the forms of those who provide examples of conduct to follow and
examples of conduct to avoid.
13. I depart from the usual translation of (haoxue) as love of learning because in English the word love is multiply ambiguous but even in its
Notes to Chapter 6
295
strong senses expresses the idea that the person is pleased by or prefers the object
of his love to other things. However, it is clear from the discussions of Yan Huis
(haoxue) that it also requires something like a strong commitment, and that
is captured by the term devotion; thus, devotion to learning is preferable here.
14. Since Waley and Chan have made this point clear, it has become common to distinguish between (ren) understood as a specific virtue along others
and (ren) understood as the most general virtue, which includes all particular
virtues. My claims here and throughout this essay concern the latter, not the former. See Waley, The Analects of Confucius, 2729. See Wing Tsit Chan, Chinese
and Western Interpretations of Jen (Humanity), Journal of Chinese Philosophy 2
(1975): 107129.
15. This formula for (ren) would work equally well for any normative
concept. For example, a person is logical provided that his conduct and thinking
lack any of those defects that would make his behavior illogical. Although Confucius
does not himself articulate this principle, it is implicit in the way he rejects persons
or forms of conduct as exemplifying (ren). See Analects 1.3, 4.7, 5.5, 5.8, 5.19,
7.34, 12.20, 14.28, 15.9, 15.35, 15.36, and 19.15.
16. One exception to this is his claims that the brothers Boyi
Shuqi sought and achieved (ren), but given the rest of his skeptical claims about
(ren), we should think either that these men had the status of the mythological
sage kings or that they achieved (ren) merely in their specific actions of refusing
to take the throne over the other. Waley likens them to sage kings by claiming that
they are legendary figures, and so in that way not real people.
17. I cannot in detail defend my approach here but will say a couple of
things. The claim that Confucius was a sage contradicts his own self-descriptions
but is based on claims of some hidden teachings and pedagogical strategies in
which he attempts to encourage his interlocutors by claiming to be like them. All
of this is part of an orthodox commentary project, like those of other religious
traditions, designed to interpret the Analects and other classical texts as embodying a completely true and consistent account of the Truth. This approach requires
commentators to claim that Confucius did not mean what he said. Any effort to
read texts under this principle gives too much interpretive license, however, and
allows us to read into the text any meaning we happen to think represents the
Truth. Also it assumes, prior to interpretation and evaluation, that the views in
the text are true. For these reasons I reject this approach. In thinking about this
issue, I benefited from John B. Henderson, Scripture, Canon, and Commentary: A
Comparison of Confucian and Western Exegesis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1991), especially 18486.
18. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 133.
19. Ibid., section 112.
20. Ibid., section 111.
21. See Wittgenstein et al., Wittgensteins Lectures, Cambridge, 19301932:
From the Notes of John King and Desmond Lee (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield,
1980), 21; Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 133.
296
Notes to Chapter 6
Notes to Chapter 7
297
meaning arises from their role in theory, not from their embeddedness in informal
practices.
33. This trilemma is also perfectly general and applies to other passages in
the Analects for which metaphysical interpretations may be offered.
Chapter 7
1. Jiwei Ci, The Confucian Relational Concept of the Person and Its Modern Predicament, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 9, no. 4 (1999): 32546.
2. In addition to the argument I offer here about the changing character
of Confucianism, it is not at all clear that any view that passes as Confucian needs
to be historically realized if that means practiced. A philosopher might offer a new
version of Confucianism that, in fact, has never been practiced.
3. Although I find their semantic theories wanting (see Chapters 3 and
4), John Makehams and Daniel Gardners accounts of the history of the Analects
commentarial tradition show one aspect of those changes. Changes in the tradition
were reflected in changes of interpretation of the Analects and other sacred texts.
4. Xiaotong Fei, From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society: A Translation of Fei Xiaotongs Xiangtu Zhongguo, With an Introduction and Epilogue, trans.
Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
5. Robert Neelly Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment
in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) makes a case for
the view that the vocabulary of American middle-class individualism covers over
more traditional commitments in tension with our individualism.
6. For my discussion of the pervasive character of this form of authority in
true-false language-games, see Chapters 2 and 5.
7. Alasdair MacIntyre, Incommensurability, Truth, and the Conversation
between Confucians and Aristotelians about the Virtues, in Culture and Modernity:
East-West Philosophic Perspectives, ed. Eliot Deutsch (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1991): 104122.
8. Or better yet, once again, I will address this question. Much of this book
directly or indirectly addresses this question.
9. MacIntyre, Incommensurability, Truth, (1991), 106.
10. A way to capture this sense that Confucius had only a small place for
theory can be found in May Sims Remastering Morals with Aristotle and Confucius
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Sim argues that despite his lack
of interest in metaphysics, Confucius implicitly understands (59) and implicitly
uses (62) Aristotles metaphysical categories, including the category of substance.
This strikes as the only possible way to defend MacIntyres point, and Sim does
this with great care. The notion of implicit use strikes me as especially problematic,
however, since elsewhere Sim claims that Confucius lacks a metaphysic (4546).
This shows that her claim importantly relies on the notion of implicit use. But
this would be no different from claiming that my grandmother implicitly uses the
298
Notes to Chapter 7
category of substance every time she talks about tables and chairs. I would, however,
deny this. Her talk might be so translated, but that is not the same thing. On this
general issue, see Wittgensteins discussion of why, when we think about a broom,
we dont think about the brooms parts in Philosophical Investigations, section 60.
11. MacIntyre, Incommensurability, Truth, 106.
12. Ibid., 120.
13. Ibid., 113.
14. Ibid., 112.
15. For my discussion of Halls and Amess account of the Confucian view
of truth, see Chapter 5.
16. MacIntyre, Incommensurability, Truth, 106 (my emphasis).
17. Ibid., 106.
18. Ibid., 106.
19. Confucius, Analects, 8.10.
20. Ibid., 14.4.
21. Ibid., 17.21.
22. MacIntyre, Incommensurability, Truth, 106.
23. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, rev. ed. (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, [1921] 1961).
24. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 43.
25. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, sections 2.0211 and 3.23.
26. MacIntyre, Incommensurability, Truth, (1991), 113.
27. For a related discussion of Wittgensteins ethics without metaphysics,
see Chapter 2.
28. James F. Peterman, Philosophy as Therapy: An Interpretation and Defense
of Wittgensteins Later Philosophical Project, SUNY Series in Philosophy and Psychotherapy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
29. For my use of this form of argument to save Confucius from Confucians, see Chapter 6.
30. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 133.
31. Ibid., section 132.
32. My account of Wittgensteins pluralism has been influenced by the way in
which he, like Rudolf Carnap, takes languages and their grammars to be plural. See
Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World; and Pseudoproblems in Philosophy,
trans. Rolf A. George (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). As a result of
holding this view, Wittgenstein takes philosophical corrections of ordinary language
as based on recommendations to change the grammar of ordinary language, not as
discoveries of some feature of the world. I have also been influenced by Gordon
Bakers later essays on Wittgensteins later therapeutic pluralism: Gordon P. Baker,
Wittgensteins Method: Neglected Aspects (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
33. One might wonder what justifies my claim that Confucius is engaged
in ethical or moral reflection. MacIntyre mentions that one form of incommensurability between Confucian and Greek traditions results in our not being free to
use the term moral to characterize early Chinese thought or practice. Following
Notes to Chapter 7
299
300
Notes to Chapter 8
46. I follow Confucius in his use of dangerous. See Analects 2.15. For an
example of the sort of truth claim Confucius makes, see my discussion of Analects
13.3 in Chapter 5 at note 14.
47. I am paraphrasing part of a sentence from Philosophical Investigations,
section 289. [T]o use a word without justification does not mean to use it wrongfully. See my discussion of this dictum in Chapter 2.
48. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (rev.
ed.), trans. G. H. von Wright, Rush Rhees, and G. E. M. Anscombe (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1978), VI.8. For a fuller discussion, see Chapter 2.
49. For a characterization of this depth, see Chapter 6, and for a characterization of the realistic spirit behind these claims, see Chapter 2.
50. I take this ladder metaphor from the concluding passages of Wittgensteins Tractatus.
51. For an additional discussion of Wittgensteins constitutivism in relation
to Confuciuss teaching, see Chapter 1.
Chapter 8
1. Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (Religious Traditions
of the World) (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 1998).
2. For an influential criticism, see Benjamin I. Schwartz, The World of
Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1985).
3. See Chapter 6 of this book.
4. See Chapter 3.
5. For a discussion of the character of moral practices implicit in Wittgensteins later philosophy, see D. Z. Phillips and H. O. Mounce, Moral Practices (New
York: Schocken Books, 1970).
6. A second example that Fingarette offers to show that ritual is magic
is the example of a teacher requesting that a student fetch a book. But, of course,
there is nothing magical here either.
7. Fingarettes (1998) appeal to the idea of Holy Rite derives from his etymological analysis of the character (li), but his analysis of this characters meaning
suffers from the problem of any such genetic analysis of meaning. It supposes that
the early root meaning is retained in later usage, either literally or metaphorically.
But if we follow Wittgenstein and think of our basic notion of meaning as use,
we will not want to use root metaphors to establish meaning except in those cases
where usage will bear that out. The meaning of (li) changes over time and
eventually comes to be identified with social norms and laws. In light of this history, we need not feel compelled to think of the etymological meaning of (li)
as governing all of its uses. See Masayuki Satos detailed history of the meaning of
(li) in The Confucian Quest for Order: The Origin and Formation of the Political
Notes to Chapter 8
301
Thought of Xun Zi, book 58, Sinica Leidensia series (Leiden, NL; Boston, MA: Brill
Academic, 2003), chapter three.
8. For Wittgensteins use of this example to illustrate what he means by
language-game, see Philosophical Investigations, section 7.
9. For a recent discussion of the way in which ritual does not always require
sincerity to be successful, see Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett,
and Bennett Simon, Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
10. He claims to find this view in Analects, but this aspect of his account
has come under attack. See Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China, 1985,
chapter 3.
11. Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, 1998, 7.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 67.
14. Ibid., 3, 8.
15. Ibid., 8.
16. Ibid., 46.
17. Ibid., 4.
18. Ibid., 1.
19. See this chapter, note 2.
20. Confucius, Analects, 2.20.
21. Ibid., 2.1.
22. Ibid., 5.16.
23. Ibid., 12.5.
24. I borrow this grammatical analysis from Christoph Harbsmeier, ed.,
Thesaurus Linguae Sericae: An Historical and Comparative Encyclopaedia of Chinese
Conceptual Schemes, accessed August 6, 2009, <http://tls.uni-hd.de/>.
25. See the translation of the Analects with accompanying grammatical analyses at Thesaurus Linguae Sericae (TLS).
26. I borrow this translation and this general point from S. Y. Chan, The
Confucian Notion of Jing (Respect), Philosophy East and West 56, no. 2 (2006):
229. Chan claims that, according to Confucius, all persons are deserving of respect
according to the Analects framework, but she bases this on the claim that everyone
is possibly a sage. But Confucius never makes this point, and, given the hierarchies
involved in his use of jing (respect), this democratizing move would have to be seen
as alien to the text. I am not, however, arguing that, given the concept of jing in
the Analects, he could not respect everyone. The evidence from the text only gives
us important examples of objects of jing, not an analysis of the limits of the concept. We do, however, know that the ethical interventions Confucius is recognized
for having engaged in did not involve him intervening to encourage everyone to
respect everyone else. If his use of the concept jing reserves it for higher-ups, then
that use would be ruled out by the concept itself. If his concept includes any object
of worth, as Chan claims, then it is not ruled out. Although both accounts are
302
Notes to Chapter 8
consistent with the text, it is clear that even if it could be argued without contradicting any passage in Analects that Confucius thought (or was motivated by the
belief ) that everyone must jing (respect) everyone, he is not presented as doing so
or as recommending it.
27. Confucius, Analects 15.24. It is noteworthy that by most accounts of the
genesis and structure of the Analects, this is a relatively late passage. Brooks and
Brooks, Original Analects, 1997, 136137 and 149, and Bryan W. Van Norden,
Unweaving the One Thread of Analects, 4:15, in Bryan W. Van Norden, Confucius
and the Analects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), argue that Analects 4.15
is a late passage. What we find in these two passages may then be an attempt to
find some unified thread not readily apparent in earlier passages.
28. Confucius, Analects 6.30.
29. Van Norden, Unweaving the One Thread. For David Nivisons analysis
of the usage of these characters in the Analects, which I follow, see his Golden
Rule Arguments in Chinese Moral Philosophy, in The Ways of Confucianism, ed.
Bryan W. Van Norden (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 5976. For Philip. J. Ivanhoes account, see his Reweaving the One Thread of the Analects, Philosophy
East and West 40, no. 1 (1990): 1733. I have simplified Nivisons account in
one way. For reasons unclear to me, Nivison allows that a person should practice
(zhong) in relations between superiors and equals and practice shu in relations
between subordinates and equals. He neither argues that the passages in the Analects
support the inclusion of equals in each practice, nor does he discuss his reason for
mentioning them. I assume he treats equals as limiting cases of superiors and subordinates. I discuss below the cases of usage of (zhong) and (shu) in which
encounters are not between equals. For Philip J. Ivanhoes recent revision of his
earlier arguments, see his The Golden Rule in the Analects, in Confucius Now:
Contemporary Encounters with the Analects, ed. David Edward Jones (Chicago: Open
Court, 2008), 81107.
30. Nivison, Golden Rule Arguments, in Van Norden, 1996, 65. In my
discussion here, I leave out Nivisons discussion of zhong practices as practices of
subordinates to superiors. For that argument, see his discussion of Analects 5.19 in
Nivison, Golden Rule Arguments, in Van Norden, 1996, 66.
31. Without explanation, Nivison in Golden Rule Arguments holds that
the requirement of (zhong) applies to a subordinate toward a superior or equal.
The requirement of (shu) applies to subordinates and equals. But he never
explains why he thinks that these requirements are appropriate toward equals. If a
superior, who by his nature has attained a superior status, can impose his will on
subordinates, who, other things being equal, are required to do his bidding, then
we can make sense of limitations on his ability to impose his will on a subordinate
as arising from this feature of the superior-subordinate relationship. It is less clear
to me that the equal-equal relationship requires any parallel limitation. Equals are
not, other things being equal, required to do the bidding of equals.
32. Ibid., 68.
33. Nivison, Golden Rule Arguments, 76.
Notes to Chapter 9
303
Chapter 9
1. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, sections 109 and 116.
2. Ibid., 238.
3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret
Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright. (New York: Harper and Row, [1969]
1972). For a detailed account of Wittgensteins views in this text, see Avrum Stroll,
Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
4. Wittgenstein, On Certainty.
5. Ibid.
6. See Chapter 8 in this book.
7. In Theoretical Continuities, Randall Collins claims that Goffmans primary work was taxonomic, awaiting a later theorist to explain the phenomenon
he categorized. Collins explains the continuity of Goffmans writings in terms of
his elaboration of Durkheimian commitments concerning the importance of ritual
in everyday life (43). In his Goffman as Systematic Social Theorist, Giddens, in
contrast, argues that Goffman has been misunderstood as he developed a systematic view of the sociological enterprise and needs to be understood as engaged in
theory. Both of these essays are reprinted in Gary Alan Fine and Gregory W. H.
Smith, Erving Goffman (London: Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000). I would argue
that Goffmans taxonomic work offers a starting point for constructing a perspicuous overview of everyday ritual even if his efforts at a system are problematic. For
example, his acknowledgment that there are rituals of insult seems to contradict
his basic systematic claims about the point of ritual. For more on this, see below.
8. Some critics, like Alasdair MacIntyre in his The Self as Work of Art in
Fine and Smith, Erving Goffman, 2000, and After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory
(South Bend, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1984) argue that Goffmans dramaturgical
view of self makes it impossible to understand ourselves as moral agents. As role
players, we can always step outside any role. And as having no substantial self, we
304
Notes to Chapter 9
Notes to Chapter 9
305
306
Notes to Afterword
Afterword
1. For another recent defense of Confucian of pluralism, see Bryan W. Van
Norden, Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 315360.
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