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Notes on video lecture:
The Transition to Becoming Sincere
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
Good, state, shaming, merits, sake, female, rote, frustrated, chess, anger, desire, compassionate, music, compassion, glib, internal, transition, worthy, try, ritual, right, Nicomachean, sincere, finished, prestige, carved, recital
anyone who has wu-wei as a spiritual goal is going to face the tension of trying not to       
the paradox of wu-wei in the Analects
Analects 3.3: "A man who is not Good, what has he to do with             ? A man who is not Good, what has he to do with music?"
ritual and            are the way you become good
Confucius is saying: you shouldn't be doing the practice unless you are already         
Goodness is cultivated by means of the Confucian practices
it can't be         , you can't just be going through the motions
you have to be involved with what you are doing at a certain level
while we may offer candy to a child in order for them to play           , to develop a higher skill and interest
virtue seems to be something that we desire for its own         
Analects 3.3 says "you shouldn't be messing with ritual unless you are doing it for the            reasons"
to become a gentleman, you need to love the Way
you can't be a hypocrite
Confucius is worried about
people being         
say the right things but don't practice what you preach
the village honest man
the "village             "
goes through the motions but doesn't feel it
you can't point to anything they are doing that is wrong
they do all the rituals property
they know all the odes by heart
they can play music
and yet, they're hollow
the petty "ru"
motivated by salary or                 
Analects 7.30
"Is Goodness really so far away? If I simply              Goodness, I will find that it is already here."
what it is about is motivation
if you really want it, you've got it
Confucius is constantly                      with people who don't love the way
Analects 9.18: "I have yet to meet a man who loves Virtue as much as he loves              beauty."
he is saying that the Way is something that someone should desire as much as sex
Analects 5.10: "Zai Wo was sleeping during the daytime."
"Rotten wood cannot be             , and a wall of dung cannot be plastered. As for ai Wo, what would be the use of reprimanding him?"
the metaphor is: his raw material is ruined
someone who has the right material
Yan Hui
as they say in Canada, he is a keener
Analects 6:3
Duke Ai asked, "Who among your disciples might be said to love learning?"
Confucius answered, "There was one named Yan Hui who loved learning. He never misdirected his           , and never made the same mistake twice. Unfortunately, his allotted lifespan was short, and he has passed away. Now that he is gone, there are none who really love learning, at least I have yet to hear of one."
Confucius is constantly                his students in this way.
Yan Hui was born learning and loved it.
but there is a tension
What do you do if you weren't born loving it?
How do you make someone into a Yan Hui?
if you apply yourself, you will eventually love it
fake it until you make it
you'll start to feel the right things
this applies to basic skills
but how this transition happen when it comes to virtue
as opposed to a craft skill
how do you become                suddenly
the lurking danger in the background is that you won't make the                     
you become a village honest person, one of these counterfeit people
how is acquiring virtue different from acquiring a skill
learning to play chess
carving and polishing a beautiful object
there's an important disanalogy between acquiring virtue and skills
recognized by Aristotle
                       Ethics
the disanalogy between crafts and virtues
the products of a craft determine by their own character whether they have been produced well, and so it suffices that they are in the right            when they have been produced
so a bowl is a good bowl when it is                 
but for actions expressing virtue to be done temperately or justly, and hence well, it does not suffice that they are themselves in the right state, rather the agent must also be in the right state when he does them
if you go to a piano               , it's beautiful, then you find out afterwards that they were actually thinking about what they were going to have for dinner, or they were counting seats and seeing how much money they were going to make
they produced something and that produce stands on its own             
there was a viral picture of a policeman putting boots on a homeless man in winter
implicit is the idea that this is motivated by the right                  motivation
if we found out later it was a public relations stunt, everything would change
it would not be a                      act anymore
this is why it is not necessarily the case that if you are not compassionate, just by working in a soup kitchen you will compassionate, since something inside has to change, not just that your skills improve
in the end, Confucius sees little other way for those who don't feel sincerity to be sincere but to practice sincere acts
if you act out compassionate behavior in a ritual way, you will become                           
but the danger is you will just become someone who simply acts compassionate, a kind of hypocrite
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