Customer Reviews

Confucian Thought (SUNY Series in Philosophy)

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Professor Tu's commentaries upon Confucian thought quite literally open a "whole new world" to those whose thought patterns descend from Athens. The Chinese have drawn their world view from Confucian thought, and from Buddhism and Taoism. The Chinese perspective contrasts sharply with Western rationalism. Intuition is highly valued, feeling and reasoning are considered to act together, the situation at hand and, above all, personal relationships, take priority over abstract principle. Professor Tu's work is not without its "practical" significance. The US and the Western world overall need to understand the Chinese world. This is a good place to begin the attempt. It will be highly rewarding.

This book provides the reader with several avenues for approaching the topic of selfhood within the context of Chinese thought. Although primarily focused on Confucianism, the author provides significant examples form Daoism and Ch'an as the three tend to view selfhood in a similar light.

I find it pretty evident that the motivation for the author to write this book can be found within the following quote from page 13. He writes,

"Whenever my compatriots teaching in American universities assure me that a distinctive advantage of discussing Confucian ethics with an English-speaking audience is that we are unencumbered with layer after layer of commentary and sub-commentary sedimentation, I feel extremely uneasy. For one thing, I do not believe that it is possible to present an undifferentiated Confucian position on vital issues, such as the idea of the self, as if there were a trans-temporal wisdom which, once revealed, would remain essentially the same. There is no monolithic Confucian self to speak of."

This essentially sums up the purpose of this book. The Confucian self is not an abstract entity that can be isolated and examined as it is always found within a greater social context and at best, dutifully pursuing cultivation in the midst of the present moment's dynamism. The author also addresses this expressive dynamism through the philosophy of qi and li. On page 37 he writes,

"The unusual difficulty in making Qi intelligible in modern Western philosophy suggests that the underlying Chinese metaphysical assumption is significantly different from the Cartesian dichotomy between spirit and matter. However, it would be misleading to categorize the Chinese mode of thinking as a sort of pre-Cartesian naivete lacking differentiation between mind and body and, by implication, between subject and object. ...The continuous presence in Chinese philosophy of the idea of Qi as a way of conceptualizing the base structure and function of the cosmos, despite the availability of symbolic resources to make an analytical distinction between spirit and matter, signifies a conscious refusal to abandon a mode of thought that synthesizes spirit and matter as an undifferentiated whole. The loss of analytical clarity is compensated by the reward of imaginative richness. The fruitful ambiguity of Qi allows philosophers to explore realms of being which are inconceivable to people constricted by Cartesian dichotomy."

This passage deftly demonstrates what is at the forefront of the author's mind when addressing the issue of self-hood as his intended audience is potentially those who carry such Cartesian biases. The strength of this book, I've found, is how he presents his ideas while constantly aware of these bias.

Here are the chapters that make up this book. I. The "Moral Universe" from the Perspectives of East Asian Thought. II. The Continuity of Being: Chinese Visions of Nature. III. A Confucian Perspective on Learning to be Human. IV. The Value of the Human in Classical Confucian Thought. V. Jen as a living Metaphor in the Confucian Analects. VI. The Idea of the Human in Mencian Thought: An Approach to Chinese Aesthetics. VII. Selfhood and Otherness: The Father-Son Relationship in Confucian Thought. VIII. Neo-Confucian Religiosity and Human-Relatedness. IX. Neo-Confucian Ontology: A Preliminary Questioning.

Overall this book had a tremendous impact on my understanding of how the individual relates to Heaven and Earth within the context of Confucianism and also clarified in several ways just what it meant by "self-cultivation." This is an excellent book and I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.