Analects 3.23 and 3.25 examining music (ES)

  
January 25, 2022



Comments

  1. Krishnan VenkateshFebruary 6, 2022 at 9:41 PM

    Maybe an account that touches on this question is Plato's section on the modes in The Republic, as well as Xunzi's. It's worth digging into this question: does music affect character? And what do you make of the lack of mention of melody in such accounts? This is worthy of a more sustained follow-up.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Christopher McCandless: The White Boy Who Could Have Just Read Confucius

“The cultivation of the person is done through the Way, and the cultivation of the Way is to be done through humanity. Humanity is Man.”       In this cosmic game of Confucian ping-pong, two are required to play. The emphasis that Confucius continues to place on virtue needing others to reach realization is of great importance in today’s day and age. Too often we are lead to believe that locking ourselves away in pursuit of accomplishing one great task is not only necessary to producing great work but also virtuous. Whether it be the pursuit of money or higher learning, to laboriously and single-mindedly chase after it often leads to higher social ranking. Confucius however, recognized the pitfalls of such narrow-mindedness and emphasis on self-importance.        Christopher McCandless, an infamous hero of western youth, seems to have struggled to the point of death to understand what Confucius considered basic truth… In order to obtain vir...
Read more

Analects 3.11

Here Confucius points to the palm of his hand and tells us that one who understands the di sacrifice "could handle the world as if he had it right here." The commentary on analect 3.10 mentions that the " di sacrifice was a special type of ancestor sacrifice, directed toward the ultimate progenitor of one's ancestral line." The details on how to perform it and by whom it was to be performed are something that had been largely forgotten by the time of the Zhou dynasty, which partially makes sense of Confucius' comment that there is a power that stems from understanding the rite. However, this does not completely explain it; there are still several questions that remain. What is it about sacrificing to one's roots that gives one political power? How are we to take understanding the ritual? Is this a form of knowledge or is it something else? Is the goal of ritual to reorder the individual person or does it have a mimetic effect that simultaneously reorders...
Read more

What’s Eating Confucius?

Image
 7.7. “I have never denied instruction to anyone who, of their own accord, offered up as little as a bundle of silk or bit of cured meat.” 7.9.  “When the master dined in the company of one who was mourning, he never ate his fill.” 7.14. “When the Master was in the state of Qi, he heard the Shao music, and for three months after did not even notice the taste of meat.” 7.16.  “Eating plain food and drinking water, having only your bent arm as a pillow— certainly there is joy to be found in this!” 7.19. “Why did you not just say: ‘he is the type of person who is so passionate that he forgets to eat,” These are only the most explicit references to eating in this book.  There are other references to fasting (7.13), fishing (7.27), and being “full of worry” (7.37) that add to the gastronomical motif.  All this in the context of several images of Confucius at leisure, with their accompanying observations on his conduct, and I am wondering: why are we thinking about fo...
Read more