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Notes on video lecture:
Eastern Holistic Thinking and the Paradox of Virtue
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on December 10, 2014 (go to class or lectures)
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
stepped, boats, other, paradox, water, friends, subordinated, Shang, goats, Ceasar, lone, impressed, Greece, interacting, same, group, solitary, reborn, unified, highest, radical, separation, maintain, structure, present, life, Ajax, moving, sharp, paddies, timing, social, holistic, small, Mediterranean, gaming, analytical, qua, agriculture, Yangtze, approved, ill, role, background, coastline, tension, collectivism, next, legitimacy, identify, carrot, China, flat, high, sacrifice, leader, background, magnified
•
the individual is tied up in their              role
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identified and honored on basis of         , not individual life history
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e.g. as ancestry or father or son
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not so much concern as individuals        individuals
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visual representation of this
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early bronze vessels
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individuals hard to                 
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large numbers of people engaged in            activities
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they are all playing their roles in the ritual
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contrast with bowl from 530 BCE             
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many individual characteristics
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recognizable individuals engaged in activities
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e.g. portrayal of Achilles and         
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figures are large and standing out against the                     
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focus is not so much the group activity and the scene that is going on
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why did            focus so much on the social role?
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higher population densities
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agriculture in the Yellow and                was able to support much more people
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living much closer together
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large scale, intensive                       
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agriculture
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Classical Greece
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goat herders wandering around on the hills alone herding           
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individual traders in small            plying the coastline on their own
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fisherman essentially engaging in relatively                  activities
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           scale farmers
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Shang culture
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large scale agriculture
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agriculture in the Yangtze River valley was based on rice
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labor intensive
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you can't be a          rice farmer
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have to create large rice               
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             is crucial
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you are essentially transforming the landscape into                hills of rice paddies
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an immense amount of            control and labor that goes into this
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so the demands of rice agriculture are going to tend to subordinate the individual to group activities
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greater territorial integrity
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China
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the Yellow River and Yangtze River valleys are fairly         
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can travel easily
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relatively                around these East-West rivers
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crops they could grow at one point on the river they could grow at another part since it was on the same latitude
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relatively non-complex                   
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not many bends, curves and coves
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Greece
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coastline
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convoluted
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rocky
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many coves that are easy to defend
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you will have more fragmentation in a civilization based in the                            than in one based in the Yellow and Yangste River valleys
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Eastern vs. Western patterns of social thought
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individualism vs.                         
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analytic vs. holistic
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exercise to identify the difference: draw a picture of how big you see yourself in relation to your friends
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gives a sense of how important you see yourself in relation to your social networks
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USA/Canada is               
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Europe's slightly smaller
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in Japan, they tend to display themselves as the          size or even smaller than
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abstract relationships vs. analog/holistic patterns
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show picture of             , rabbit and dog, ask which goes together
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                 thinker will say rabbit and carrot, tend to think in terms of scenes and relationships, and rabbits eat carrots
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                     thinker will say rabbit and dog go together, "animals go together since they are the same category of being"
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show fish tank
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analytical thinkers tend to concentrate on the              fish
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holistic thinkers tend to see more of what is in the                     , i.e. everything in tank
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research in China shows that people from wheat regions tend to think more analytically than those from rice regions
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suggests a link between a how you make your living and how you see yourself in relation to your               
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thinking of yourself as a collective is probably the default way people have historically thought about themselves
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what's new is individualism and analytic thinking that develops in Northern Europe at a certain time
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unity of politics and religion in the            Dynasty
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king is also the          priest
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all religious functions are                          to his rule
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no independent priesthood
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there's no                      of church and state to use contemporary terminology
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you can't separate the state from its religious affairs
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the state receives its                      directly from its function as a religious organization
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very different than models of religion in of the world
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Christianity
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strong sense of rendering under              what is Ceasar's
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we're going to have this kingdom of God that's going to be in the          world
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Buddhism
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a prince which is incompatible with him being a religious figure
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he has to give up his political role in order to become a religious             
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in early China, politics, religion and family are all tied together
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lack of a            divide between life and death
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ancestors are not gone
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we're aware they are dead, we've buried their corpses in the ground
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but they are still                in an important, social way
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people are still                        with them
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e.g. through sacrifice and divination
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they continue to influence the world
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the world the ancestors lived in was much like their own
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they                  social roles, status, personality, activities they had in life
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so unlike Christianity, they didn't have the concept of death as a                change where you go from an earthly world to the kingdom of heaven
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and unlike in Buddhism of Karma, the idea that you are going to die and get              in a completely different form
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death doesn't change the social                    of the present
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               of virtue, of "de"
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de, or moral charisma, can only be acquired by someone who is not consciously tryng to acquire it
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it accrues to someone who is genuinely virtuous and genuinely           -oriented
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oracle bones which portray stories of virtue
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1. king's consort has fallen       
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king petitions the spirits to let him take her place
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the spirit was                    and spared both of them
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2. two princes fall ill
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king seems to offer his          for them
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"the assisting princes having been restored to health, the king's de is with this even even more                  by the ancestors"
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the king's offer of self-                   has this result:
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sick person gets well
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king does not get ill
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the king's "de" or virtue is                   
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but it works only if the king is not              the system
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he has to be sincere, he has to know he is not acting in order to gain virtue, this is the paradox
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this                of how to gain virtue is something many ancient Chinese philosophers dealt with

Spelling Corrections:

ancestory ⇒ ancestry
Mediterreanean ⇒ Mediterranean
wholistic ⇒ holistic

Ideas and Concepts:

On the agricultural reasons why individualism arose in Ancient Greece but not so much in Ancient Shang Culture, via tonight's Ancient Chinese Thought course:

"If you look at early Shang Dynasty pottery, single individuals are rare and hard to identify. When people are represented in Shang art, they are usually in large numbers engaged in some group activity, playing their roles in the some ritual or participating together in some group task.

Greece pottery, on the other hand, often portrays people with individual characteristics, even recognizable individuals such as Achilles and Ajax, and they are often engaged in an activity which informs you about their individual personality or character. Greek artistic figures tend to be large and standing out against the background, focused not so much on any group activity but on individual endeavors.

One reason for this is the differences in agriculture in Ancient Greece and Ancient China.

In Greece you tended to have small farmers living at significant distances from each other each tending their barley patches, vineyards, and olive trees. You had individual goat herders wandering around on the hills alone, single traders in small boats plying the coastline on their own, and fisherman essentially engaged in solitary activities.

Ancient Shang culture, on the other hand, already supported large scale agriculture, mostly through the cultivation of rice in the Yangtze River valley. Rice agriculture is extremely labor intensive:you can't be a lone rice farmer. Timing is crucial which results in demand spikes of intensive labor that requires hundreds or even thousands of people to work together, and you are essentially transforming the landscape into vast fields and stepped hills of rice paddies, all which requires an immense amount of water control which in turn requires heavy labor and management of a large portion of the population.

So while agriculture in Greece tended to separate people into lone activities which encouraged the individuality that we recognize in the Greek culture, the demands of rice agriculture in China tended to subordinate the individual to group activities."
On the difference between holistic and analytic thinking, via tonight's Ancient Chinese Thought course: "When you show a picture of a carrot, a dog, and a rabbit to people and ask which two objects best go together, those who tend to think in terms of scenes and relationships will answer that the carrot and the rabbit go together since rabbits eat carrots. This is an example of holistic thinking. Another group of people will tend to look at the objects in terms of categories and will answer that the dog and the rabbit best go together, since both of these objects belong to the same category of being. This is an example of analytic thinking."
Acronym of the day via tonight's Ancient Chinese Thought course: "W.E.I.R.D. = Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, And Democratic. "Almost everything experimental psychologists believe about the human mind comes from studies of people from W.E.I.R.D. countries. But perhaps you've guessed the problem:from a global standpoint, people from these countries may not representative of the world's population. Many phenomena we've assumed are universal probably aren't:we can only really say they're universal among W.E.I.R.D. people, who make up 96% of subjects in behavioral science, or Americans, who make up 68%, and often only among US college students."
The Definition of Religion
Mind/Body Dualism and Cognitive Control
Deontology, Utilitarianism, and Virtue Ethics
Wu-Wei, Dao, Tien and De
The Shang Dynasty (1554-1045 BC)
The Beginnings of Written Chinese History
Eastern Holistic Thinking and the Paradox of Virtue
The Golden Age of the Western Zhou (1046–771 BCE)
Philosophical and Conceptual Innovations in Zhou Thought
Confucius and the Analects
Confucius: I Transmit, I Do Not Innovate
Confucius' Use of Ritual as a Tool
Confucius' View on Learning vs. The Enlightenment
Confucius and Holistic Education
Confucius and the Art of Self-Cultivation
At Home in Virtue
Non-Coercive Comportment, Virtue, and Charisma of the Zhou
The Transition to Becoming Sincere
The Primitivists in the Analects
Laozi and the Daodejing
Laozi: Stop the Journey and Return Home
Laozi and The Desires of the Eye
Laozi: He Who Speaks Does Not Know
The Concept of Reversion
Laozi on Shutting Down the Prefrontal Cortex
The Guodian Laozi
Mozi and Materialist State Consequentialism
Mozi's Idea of Ideological Unity
Mozi's Doctrine of Impartial Caring
Mozi's Anti-Confucian Chapters
Mozi's Religious Fundamentalism and Organized Activism
The Language Crisis in the Warring States Period
Yang Zhu and Mid-Warring States' Focus on the Body
The Guodian School of Confucianism
Qi and Self-Cultivation