A Ku Indeed!

Tomorrow we are off for an extended weekend trip to Beidaihe, a beach in Hubei province about two and a half hours from Beijing (on the fast train — 5 on the slow). We’ve been telling Parker (our 4 year old) for the last few days that we’re going to the beach and today she final said in an annoyed tone to my wife, “Why does Dora always get to go to the beach every time and we never do?” Some context: Parker watches “Dora saves the Mermaid” (Dora the Explorer) on my laptop all the time, and in it, Dora goes to the beach. So she mixes up the fact that she watches the same video all the time with Dora being some avid beach comer. She senses our lack of frequent beach trips to some kind of injustice. It was cute. My wife tried to explain that Dora was just a cartoon, but she didn’t seem to buy it.

Also, a shout out to my wife’s blog, here. She’s recently been on a real streak blogging about various things associated with our stay in China and the cultural interactions we inevitably have along the way. The last post — on the “1st of 2,337″ things she’ll miss about China is particularly noteworthy.

I’ve blogged many times before on the role of shu (恕) in Confucianism. Specifically, I’ve commented here before on shu, here on Ivanhoe’s particular interpretation of the concept (and on Van Norden’s here) and its overall role in the Analects and here on some associated consequences. Here I’m just thinking further, and continuing that train of thought. I’m thinking out loud again.

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In comments in another post, Annaping Chin’s book The Authentic Confucius came up. The reminder about Chin’s book made me think about something in it that bothered me quite a bit when I read it a while ago. The bothersome element lies in a story she tells about Kongzi’s life. Whether what she says or not is apocryphal or not I cannot say. Either way, the portrait she paints in this story is disturbing to me for a number of reasons. Perhaps I have no good reasons for being bothered. In any case, I’ll outline the situation below.

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Sometimes when I read things like this, I wonder what planet I’m living on. Responsible white supremacists? It amazes me that a split could exist in such a community, between the “nutjob white supremacists” and the “responsible, clear-headed white supremacists”. Well, on second thought — maybe it’s not so suprising. Lots of people in America also seem to think that as long as you aren’t lynching blacks from trees, you can’t possibly be considered a racist.

Sigh.

A colleague of mine in the US sent out an email to the faculty linking to this discussion about the latest in the never ending efforts by some students to become more and more effective at being undetected while engaging in various forms of academic dishonesty.

Among colleagues, I know that this is a perennial subject of conversation. This and that method comes into existence for cheating in this way, or in that way, and it gets harder and harder to figure out who is cheating, when they are doing it, and to what degree.

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Well known blog provocateur Alexus MacLeod started a bit of an argument using his Facebook status as the vehicle. He wrote that he:

…just came upon an English translation of Yu Dan’s book on Confucius in a random Delhi bookstore, and has come to two conclusions: 1) Yu Dan is utterly and disastrously confused about the Analects and the Confucian tradition. 2) At the same time, she’s following a revered Confucian (and Chinese in general) method, of presenting her own ideas and claiming they’re those of some revered sage (in this case, Confucius)

I had some disagreements with the flow of comments that followed in the thread under the status update. Perhaps that conversation could continue here, as Facebook threads are a bit too small for my liking?

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A friend of mine here at Tsinghua University is working on her doctoral dissertation (in literature) and asked me to comment on a poem she is writing about. The poem is by Li-Young Lee, a poet whose writings are as interesting as his own family background (click the link). I found the poem to be very intriguing on a number of levels, and also quite beautiful. I’ve reproduced it below the fold, without comment (I sent her my lengthy thoughts by email), so as not to set up any possible interpretations as a background context. If anyone is interested, I’d be curious to read any reflections about its meaning (or the meaning of any of its parts).

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Ivanhoe states in his chapter on Confucius (“Kongzi’s View of the Way”) that: “Those few who are able to temper a commitment to fulfilling their role-specific obligations with sympathetic concern manifest what Kongzi called “complete goodness” (ren).”

Some issues follow.

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One of the qusetions that always comes up with attempts to push Confucius in too far a communitarian direction is the possible (or perceived, or threatened) loss of autonomy. Typically, it is taken as “obvious” that the best way to secure autonomy is along more classically liberal lines, seeing “independent” selves as at an advantage over “interdependent” selves in this regard. On this, I find Tocueville’s observations about America interesting.

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I find the whole “shame vs guilt” thing as interesting as I find it confusing. Every time I think I’ve “got it” I find out soon after that I really don’t, or that I’ve latched onto some superficial way of drawing the distinction. So today I was reading an article (“Why Do Koreans Always Say “We” But Do “I”?) that had a section on guilt and shame. In it was a part that I’m not exactly clear on, reproduced below.

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…or, in English — today I was not a moral exemplar. Well, at least with respect to Analect 1.14, which starts: “a junzi never goes on eating until he is sated…”

As 1.14 continues, it advises that a person should learn to be capable of stopping just short of the goals of one’s desires (there’s a poem in the Tao Te Ching on just this!). So, in the case of food, one should stop eating before one is fully satisfied.

Not today.

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There are lots of difficulties that come up in teaching Chinese Philosophy to Westerners. Some of the difficulties are shared across different texts (the difficulty of reading Tao Te Ching and the Analects, for example). In other cases, the difficulties are specific to the content of the philosophy. For instance, when students dislike Confucius (not that they all do, but this is a common complaint), it is because they see him as very stiff and overly structured (in a way that the Tao Te Ching may not, for example). To borrow a phrase from Dennett, when students don’t like Confucius, it is because they feel as if there’s no elbow room within the philosophy for them to move around. They feel smothered. They want him to loosen up. Where’s the WD40?

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Much of Confucianism, to me anyway, deals with the important real-life-issue of conflict resolution. When people have disagreements, they need to have ways of settling or resolving those disagreements in a way that promotes or facilitates harmonious interaction (complicated phrase, but that’s not the subject of this post).

Zhuangzi also has a few things to say about conflict resolution. As one would expect, of course, he wants us to think a bit more about what it really involves (past the Confucian notion). The quote below the fold not only led me to think more about the Confucian notion of conflict resolution but also got me thinking a bit about the recent “flap” regarding Obama’s speech in Cairo, much of which was designed to take a particular position in the world with respect to a larger world conflict resolution (Israel-Palestine, West-the East (Islam), etc).

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