Whose Tradition? Which Dao?

James F. Peterman

Description

In an incisive work of comparative philosophy, James F. Peterman considers the similarities between early Chinese ethicist Confucius and mid-twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Their enduring legacies rest in no small part on projects to restore humanity to healthy ways of living and thinking. Confucius offers a method of answering ethical questions designed to get his interlocutors further along on the Dao, the path of right living. Struggling with his own forms of unhealthy philosophical confusion, Wittgenstein provides a method of philosophical therapy designed to help one come into agreement with norms embedded in our forms of life and speech. Highlighting similarities between the two philosophers, Peterman shows how Wittgensteinian critique can benefit from Confucian inquiry and how Confucian practice can benefit from Wittgensteinian investigations. Furthermore, in presenting a way to understand Confucius's Dao as concrete language games and forms of life, and Wittgenstein's therapeutic interventions as the most fitting philosophical orientation toward early Confucian ethics, Peterman offers Western thinkers a new, sophisticated understanding of Confucius as a philosopher.
Preface
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: A Prologue to an Unlikely Project

2. Confucius, Wittgenstein, and the Problem of Moral Disagreement

3. Confucius, History, and the Problem of Meaning

4. Wittgenstein and the Problem of Understanding at a Distance

5. How to Be a Confucian Pragmatist without Losing the Truth

6. Saving Confucius from the Confucians

7. The Dilemmas of Contemporary Confucianism

8. Fingarette on Handshaking

9. Acknowledging the Given: Our Complicated Form of Ritual Life

Afterword: The Way Backward or Forward: Wittgenstein or Confucius?

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Éthique et morale
• Ethique et morale
• Confucianism
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 03 décembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438454214
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 11 Mo

Extrait

Whose Tradition? Which Dao?
SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture

Roger T. Ames, editor
Whose Tradition? Which Dao?
Confucius and Wittgenstein on Moral Learning and Reflection
JAMES F. PETERMAN
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Eileen Nizer
Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Peterman, James F.
Whose tradition? Which Dao? : Confucius and Wittgenstein on moral learning and reflection / James F. Peterman.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5419-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5421-4 (ebook)
1. Ethics. 2. Confucius. 3. Confucius. Lun yu. 4. Confucian ethics. 5. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951. I. Title. BJ1012.P438 2015 170.92'2—dc23 2014002776
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To All of My Teachers
曰 . 三人行 , 必有我師焉 . 擇其善者而從之 . 其不善者而改之 . The Master said, “If there are several people walking on the road, surely there will be my guiding exemplars among them. I would choose [from among] them whoever is adept [at complying with the Way] and then follow them. In addition, I would choose whoever is not adept [at complying with the Way] and use their [examples] to rectify my conduct.”
—Analects 7.22
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: A Prologue to an Unlikely Project
2 Confucius, Wittgenstein, and the Problem of Moral Disagreement
3 Confucius, History, and the Problem of Meaning
4 Wittgenstein and the Problem of Understanding at a Distance
5 How to Be a Confucian Pragmatist without Losing the Truth
6 Saving Confucius from the Confucians
7 The Dilemmas of Contemporary Confucianism
8 Fingarette on Handshaking
9 Acknowledging the Given: Our Complicated Form of Ritual Life
Afterword: The Way Backward or Forward: Wittgenstein or Confucius?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
This book offers the first full-length comparative study of the ethics of ancient Chinese ethicist Confucius and the moral aspects of the later therapeutic approach to philosophy of twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The title, Whose Tradition? Which Dao ?: Confucius and Wittgenstein on Moral Learning and Reflection , which alludes to Alasdair MacIntyre’s book, Whose Justice ? Which Rationality ? (1989), takes seriously a key claim of MacIntyre’s: Any sustainable version of moral inquiry must not be committed to basic claims and principles that make that inquiry impossible. To offer an example from MacIntyre’s playbook: If liberalism claims that all moral traditions make arbitrary assumptions about moral truth and it turns out that liberalism is itself a moral tradition, then liberalism makes claims that undermine its very possibility. I will refer to this requirement as the requirement that moral traditions and their related versions of moral inquiry may not be self-undermining. This principle of evaluation of traditions, or what MacIntyre calls “versions” of moral inquiry, can be traced back to the Socratic requirement that ethical judgments be accounted for in a way that is coherent with the rest of the person’s considered judgments. This book seeks to defend an interpretation of Confucius’s project, depicted in the centrally important early Confucian text, Analects, as operating in what Wittgenstein scholar Cora Diamond, taking a phrase from Wittgenstein, refers to as the “realistic spirit.” The “realistic spirit,” as distinct from the philosophical realist, seeks, as she puts it, to clarify “our life” with concepts, including ethical life, in all its complexity, suspicious of the simplification and nonsense bound up with traditional metaphysics.
Although the Socratic requirement that versions of moral inquiry not be self-undermining is a basic principle for evaluation of competing versions of moral inquiry, MacIntyre’s use of it to challenge the Confucian moral tradition is unsuccessful. Although I explicitly take up MacIntyre’s challenge to Confucianism in Chapter 7 , the whole project of the book can be seen as offering an account of three key aspects of the version of moral inquiry found in the centrally important Confucian text, the Analects , which offers a distinctive, credible version of moral inquiry. This approach to moral inquiry, like Wittgenstein’s quite similar approach to philosophical inquiry in the realistic spirit, gives central place to moral practices and to reflection on the meaning and significance of those practices by practitioners. Central to Confucian moral practices is the practice of ritual ( 禮 li ). Confucian moral inquiry requires training in ritual, as well as reflection on the practice of ritual guided by a master of such ritual practice and reflection.
Confucius approaches moral inquiry in a way that avoids abstract, theoretical reflection on questions of moral epistemology and ontology. As a result, the presentation of the Analects ’ approach to moral inquiry is not as fully developed as is required for systematic assessment. To solve this problem, I turn to the later writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who offers an approach to the relation between practice and reflection that is remarkably similar to Confucius’s. Drawing on Wittgenstein to develop an account of the early Confucian version of moral inquiry in Chapter 1 , “Introduction: A Prologue to an Unlikely Project,” I use this version of moral inquiry later in the book to address a range of potential problems facing Confucian moral inquiry, which, if not adequately addressed, threaten to undermine it.
In Chapter 2 , “Confucius, Wittgenstein, and the Problem of Moral Disagreement,” I take up the question of whether this version of moral inquiry has adequate resources to address the problem of moral disagreement. The problem arises inevitably from the way in which this version of moral inquiry avoids appeals to foundational moral epistemology and ontology. Any account of moral inquiry that offers no account of how to address the problem of moral disagreement is possibly self-undermining. I argue that Confucius’s appeal to inherited practices learned by novices under the guidance of a master offers a possible solution to the problem of moral disagreement, one based on its commitment to the authority of a master who transmits traditional norms to novices.
Another serious problem for Confucian moral inquiry, with its appeal to founding texts, like the Analects , is the problem of meaning of texts written more than two thousand years ago in a non-Western culture. Appealing to accounts of the meanings of the sentences in the Analects, which I refer to as semantic nihilism and skepticism, John Makeham and Daniel Gardner have argued that the substance of the Analects has no meaning or no knowable meaning of its own. For a version of moral inquiry that makes essential appeal to its founding texts as exhibiting norms of conduct, this result would be undermining, and this version of moral inquiry would be self-undermining. If Gardner and Makeham are correct, the meaning of the founding texts of the Confucian tradition would not be available to provide guidance to the tradition. Instead, each interpreter of these texts creates merely his or her own personal meaning.
I discuss both of these views of meaning in Chapter 3 , “Confucius, History, and the Problem of Meaning.” By appealing to Wittgenstein’s view of meaning as use and the view of the principle of charity implicit in that account, in Chapter 4 , “Wittgenstein and the Problem of Understanding at a Distance,” I argue against these views of semantic nihilism and skepticism. I argue that the meanings of the sentences of the Analects themselves are internally related to practices of interpretation within a community of trained readers of early Chinese texts who are committed to making maximum sense of these sentences in light of historical evidence and to their having learned the form of life that gives these sentences their meanings. Specifically, I argue that making sense of some unfamiliar texts embedded in an unfamiliar form of life requires learning the basic practices and original language of that culture. I refer to this version of interpretive charity as the Principle of Insider Competency.
Like other recent interpreters of early Chinese philosophy, I offer an account of Confucian moral inquiry that gives a central place to practice and reflection on the meanings of learned practices. We can refer to this strain of interpretations as “pragmatic.” But the best known versions of such interpretations, Donald Munro’s, Chad Hansen’s, David Hall’s, and Roger Ames’s, tend to offer a pragmatic version of early Chinese philosophy that holds that it operates without a concept of or interest in truth. The versions offered of this basic view are, indeed, subtle, and I cannot do them justice in this Preface. But I can say that if these accounts of early Confucianism were true, the early Confucian version of moral inquiry would be self-undermining. Any putatively true claims Confucius would be making—and he makes and implies many such claims—would be self-undermining. In Chapter 5 , “How to Be a Confucian Pragmatist without Losing the Truth,” using a suggestion of Hall and Ames, I argue that the focus on pragmatics need not come at the price of truth. I appeal to the philosophy of Wittgenstein to support my argument. I develop the vie