“Within the web of Confucian relations, intimate friendships take on a transformative force that can only be adequately explained by understanding them as an extension and amplification of the family itself. As a dimension of a Confucian family-centered ethic, friendship serves as a definite, sometimes compensatory source of meaning and value. While immediate family relations […]
“The timelessness and broad appeal of the teachings of Confucius begins from the insight that the life of almost every human being, regardless of where or when, is played out within the context of his or her own particular family, for better or worse. For Confucius and for generations of Chinese that have followed after […]
“The principle of individuation in this cosmology is not a ready-made and replicable essential identity that constitutes us as natural kinds––a soul, a heavenly-endowed human nature, a rational mind, a virtuous character, a self-conscious self, an independent agency. Rather, it is a qualitatively achieved distinctiveness in the configuring of one’s relations within family and community. […]
“Restated in the cosmological language of focus and field, Mencius is saying that, when properly nurtured and cultivated, his ‘flood-like qi‘ achieves the greatest ‘extensive’ (most vast) and ‘intensive’ (most firm) magnitudes in his relations with his environs. This language of extensive field and intensive focus suggests that when one nourishes one’s qi most successfully, […]
“This Great Tradition in telling the story of its own origins explains how a human responsiveness to context has in the past, and continues now, to enchant the cosmos. The remote ancestors Fu Xi and Shen Nong established a rhythm in the human experience, enabling them to chime in with the cadence of the ‘flux […]
“While translation is always pursued at real risk to both rhyme and reason, surely what can be found in translation is also an additional measure of meaning and elegance. Try as we might, we cannot avoid to some degree ‘making up’ our interpretation and ‘making over’ the text with it. But at the same time, […]
“Simply put, the philosophical fallacy is committed whenever the outcome of a process is presumed to be antecedent to that process––whenever some ostensive ‘principle’ is identified, isolated, and abstracted from the flow of experience and is then used anachronistically and reduplicatively to rationalize an always-emergent history. Dewey from early on saw as ‘the most pervasive […]
“When we turn to the art of being most fully human, disclosure in our relationships is what makes this family and this community meaningful, or said more dynamically, is what makes these radically embedded relationships a situated case of ‘meaning making.’ Any understanding of harmony that demands conformity at the expense of a disclosing particularity […]
The last two weeks have brought some slow progress, but we are still a few weeks away from anything big. One of our most immediate projects is to double the size of our vegetable garden. We want to put in a new pond, at least five new 12′ by 3′ raised beds, and a 8′ […]
“We need to wrap our minds around the fact that as human beings we are inherently limited in our ability to reason and to discover things about the world. These limitations do not give us a license to arbitrarily ‘go beyond’ reason and evidence into religion or mysticism. On the contrary, they are reminders that […]