Analects 18.6: Man vs. the Beasts

 In 18.6, Confucius reflects on a conversation with some recluses, leading him to say, "A person cannot flock together with the birds and the beasts. If I do not associate with the followers of men, then with whom would I associate?" This is a pretty damning indictment of the recluses; Confucius thinks that in running away from the degradations of the age, they are also running away from their humanity. Is this analysis contingent on his idea of the Junzi? The Junzi is one who pursues Ren, or humanness, which seems to entail some interaction with other human beings, even morally fallen human beings. The Taoists recluses then cannot be pursuing Ren, but rather some other virtue that might be more native to animals then human beings. What is this virtue? 

Comments

  1. Krishnan VenkateshMarch 29, 2022 at 9:33 AM

    Good question. The answer might be in Laozi or Zhuangzi. But would they even think of it as a virtue to be pursued?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

和 [hé] - Harmonious Ease in the practice of ritual (Analects 1.12) (RG)

和 1.12: Master You said: “When it comes to the practice of ritual, it is harmonious ease that is to be valued. It is precisely such harmony that makes the Way of the former Kings so beautiful. If you merely stick rigidly to ritual in all matters, great and small, there will remain that which you cannot accomplish. Yet if you know enough to value harmonious ease but try to attain it without being regulated by the rites, this will not work either.” - Slingerland, pg. 5, Analects Book 1  I’m writing the following post not because I am overly resistant to what we’re learning - I have a lot of respect for it, actually - or, because I am regressively clinging to what I already know, but because I am trying to contend with two opposing trains of thought: having spent a good amount of time admiring Zhuangzi, who uses Confucius as a comedic stock character in his writings, I am trying to find a way to transfer from one mode of teaching to another, which supposedly opposes it.  The con...
Read more

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