“This Confucian conception of person makes no appeal to superordinate, substantive categories such as ‘soul,’ ‘self,’ ‘will,’ ‘faculties,’ ‘nature,’ ‘mind,’ ‘character,’ and so on, but instead locates person gerundively as the embodied, social activity of thinking and feeling within the manifold of relations that constitutes family, community , and the natural environment. ‘Person’ thus understood […]
“First, in our interactions, we must not look askance at each other (ni). We must get beyond viewing each other obliquely and with distrust. In the mutual shaping that occurs through both patterns of deference and the modeling that such patterns entail, we require the utmost focus and concentration and the fullest application of all […]
“The integrative nature of the moral experience means that a socially responsive ‘sense of shame’ (chi) is of high value in Confucian culture. As we have seen, shame is such a powerful expression of moral awareness that, when properly nurtured, can become a pervasive value that enables the community to be both inclusive and self-regulating […]
“[John] Dewey invests enormously in the centrality of language and other modes of communicative discourse (including signs, symbols, gestures, and social institutions) in explaining how the community grows its persons: Through speech a person dramatically identifies himself with potential acts and deeds; he plays many roles, not in successive stage of life but in a […]
“The Confucian claim that ‘everyone can become a sage’ is often read essentialistically as an assertion that the sage is some universally given potential in human nature that if actualized provides a person with those extraordinary talents through which to shape the world in some incomparable way. Some interpreters in searching for democratic elements in […]
“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 […]