EDWARD'S LECTURE NOTES:
More notes at http://tanguay.info/learntracker
C O U R S E
Chinese Thought: Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Science
Edward Slingerland, University of British Columbia
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C O U R S E L E C T U R E Confucius and the Art of Self-Cultivation Notes taken on October 19, 2015 by Edward Tanguay |
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strength of the Confucian strategy
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taking cold, abstract system 2 knowledge and build it into our hot system, so it becomes automatic
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creating moral skills
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give you flexibility and autonomy
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don' need to rely on your system 2 cognition
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cultivating the self
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ritual
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the classics
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archery
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music
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various arts
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you learn these culture forms
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you train yourself intensely in them
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the result if you do this long enough is a transformation
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taking the meaning of these external forms and making them a part of your hot cognition
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the goal is to be morally perfect, yet effortlessly
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Confucian vision of wu-wei
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spontaneity and naturalness resulting from learnedness
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a naturalness when you have internally completely new ways of being in the world
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Analects 2.4
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"At age fifteen I set my mind upon learning, at thirty I took my place in society, at forty I became free of doubts, at fifty I understood Heaven's Mandate, at sixty my ear was attuned, and at age seventy I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety"
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at 70, he can do whatever comes into his heart and mind, follow it, be spontaneous, and yet everything is ritually perfect
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he has trained his hot cognition so that it perfectly accords with the demands of Confucian culture
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the model is one of domestication
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taking something that was wild and shaping it into something new and more tame
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skill acquisition
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muscle memory
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basal ganglia memory
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practicing things, using cold cognition
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becomes part of your automatic hot systems
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what Confucius wanted to do with moral skills parallels what we know about how physical skills are required
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the two get melded
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cold cultural knowledge
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hot bodily dispositions
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instincts
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desires
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metaphor of carving and polishing
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what we are born with is not what we need
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it is a raw, ugly, unshaped thing
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we apply a new thing from the outside, a tool, which reshapes this material
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but once it's reshaped, we have a perfect artifact, reshaped raw material
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this tends to make sense to us from a contemporary perspective
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e.g. how to learn how to roll a kayak
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the kayaking equivalent of Confucius in action
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it's potentially deceiving because it seems so easy
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the reason it is hard is you are having to do about six or seven completely unnatural moves
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you have to suppress perfectly normal instincts such as
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flipping upside down
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submerging yourself in water
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panicking when you are upside down under water
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have to keep your head in the water till the last moment
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if you pick your head up you have a centrifugal force, the weight of your submerged body will pull you back down again
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so you have to suppress the normal instinct to get your head out of the water
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so there are a number of things that are completely counter-intuitive
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you have to keep doing them until they become natural
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how to drive a car
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had to learn many movements then put them all together
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we aren't born knowing how to do these things
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contrasting with dominant Western models of being civilized
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Western model
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conscious cognitive control
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metaphor: your are constantly trying to control wild horses
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you are the conscious mind trying to reign them in
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cold cognition trying to control hot cognition
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dominant Enlightenment approach
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strategies for socialization
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always exerting cognitive control
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Chinese model
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hot cognition gets domesticated
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metaphor: you riding on a well-trained horse
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strategies for socialization
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domestication
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commitment strategies
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fast, frugal, reliable, and automatic (wu-wei)
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you have new new values and virtues that you didn't have before
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virtue
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a stable disposition to act in a proper way
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a normitively desirable habit
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involves specific domains and situations
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self-activating
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when honesty is required it is called forth automatically
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train people's perception
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what is involved in compassion is seeing opportunities for compassion
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acquiring a virtue requires seeing the world in a different way
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appeal
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fast, frugal
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gives you a degree of flexibility and autonomy
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you can go beyond your training since you can go beyond it and use it in new ways
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example
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Jazz improv: "I'll be Bach"
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plays Bach but then starts messing with it
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it's a compelling performance because he can play Bach
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you have to master it first, and then bend and twist it in certain ways
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language use
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you typically can't employ humor or make jokes in a language until you have mastered it to quite a degree
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one of the last things you are able to do is twist language in various ways
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e.g. Lewis Carroll
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"Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in teh wabe, all mimsy were teh borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe"
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Confucius as a true master
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Analects 9.3
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a ceremonial cap made of linen is prescribed by the rites, but these days people use silk. This is frugal, adn I follow the majority.
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to bow before ascending the stairs is what is prescribed by the rites, but these days people bow after ascending, this is arrogant, and, though it goes against the majority, I continue to bow before ascending
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two alterations of ritual
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one is fine
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one is not
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he is a master of ritual and so he can tell when a change is ok and when it is not
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In Analects 9.3, Confucius states that an alteration in a rite is permissible if it will not, in the opinion of one who has mastered it, alter its essential meaning. Some people look at this passage and conclude that Confucius was about freedom and innovation. I don't know how one can interpret Confucius in this way, this is a guy who would not sit if his mat wasn't straight.
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So we don't want to turn Confucius into a kind of existential self-making person, or import to many Romantic ideas of creativity into the Analects, as Confucius was an very conservative person. But he does emphasize the importance of flexibility and understanding the tradition in a flexible way, and unless you have this flexibility, you haven't really learned the tradition properly.
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the goal of Confucian self-cultivation is to train people so that they have internalized the Confucian way to the point that it is spontaneous, it's natural, it's not self-conscious, and that means they have a flexibility and an ability to adapt to situations in a manner that someone who hasn't internalized it can't