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Confucius on learning

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xue [shee-AY-ah]

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often translated as "study"

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better translation is "learning"

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just as process of ritual gives us a language for acting, allows us to behave like cultured human being

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hand shakes

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thank you notes

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xue (learning/studying) allows us to think like cultured human beings

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today in Western society we are very much believers in creative thought

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coming up with new ideas

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e.g. Apple slogan: Think Different

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we have geniuses who come up with completely new ideas

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this is what we value

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if you want to translate this into Confucius language, it's "Think Ancient"

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Confucius wants you to think like the Zhou Dynasty kings thought

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Analects 17.10

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"A man who has not mastered the Odes is like someone standing with this face to the wall"

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you need to have traditional learning in order to think properly

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two concepts

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Xue [zhoo] - learning (acquiring Classic knowledge)

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Si [see] - thinking and reflecting

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thinking and reflecting is not something you can do outside the context of learning

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the tools that you use in learning are the classics

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traditional texts like the Book of Odes or the Book of History

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to Confucius, these books are distillations of the right way to think

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so the goal is to memorize the classics and internalize the language and the message

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gave you a vocabulary

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e.g. the proper way to express anger is indirectly

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today you still see this that it is preferable to express yourself indirectly

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paragon modeling

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important to understand how the classics work

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not about following commandments but imitating

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they tell stories about the Duke of Zhou, King Wen and King Wu

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seeing how they behaved in difficult situations, you absorb proper values

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this is not completely foreign to us in Western society

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in Christianity we have this phrase "What would Jesus do?" which captures the spirit of paragon modeling

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and we have stories of how he behaved in various situations

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this idea is that by hearing these stories over and over again, you extract a pattern of behavior that you can use in your own life

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learning and thinking

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not just pouring knowledge into an empty mind

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although learning is based on acquiring a high amount of experience reading the classics

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requires individual participation

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you have to engage in reflection

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requires thinking and concentration

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but acquiring knowledge has priority over thinking

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Analects 2.15, "If you learn without thinking about what you have learned, you will be lost, but if you think without learning, you will fall into danger, the latter being the worst of the two"

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to think without acquiring knowledge is a way of reinventing the wheel

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thinking outside the classics will probably lead to randomness and chaos, it is a doomed endeavor

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"the Zhou dynasty figured this stuff out and figured it out right, they have these documents preserved, so this is what we need to start with if we are going to be a proper human being"

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Analects 15.31, "I once engaged in thought for an entire day without eating and an entire night without sleeping, but it did no good, it would have been better for me to have spent that time in learning."

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Western Enlightenment is opposed to this idea

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in the West, we admire thinking is autonomous

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the whole idea of the Enlightenment was about freeing thought from tradition

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wake up, stop listening to what the priests say

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stop being a child, be an adult and think for yourself

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if you want to change the world, change the way you think

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but it is odd movement since most cultures value traditional thought

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Descartes: "There is not novelty to me in the reflection that, from my earliest years, I have accepted many false opinions as true, and that what I have concluded from such badly assured premises could not but be highly doubtful and uncertain. From the time that I first recognized this, I have realized that if I wished to have any firm and constant knowledge in the sciences, I would have to undertake, once and for all, to set aside all the opinions which I had previously accepted among my beliefs and start again from the very beginning."

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in other words, if you want sure and certain knowledge, you need to forget everything your culture has taught you and begin again on solid foundations

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Descartes then decided to engage in a "serious and unimpeded effort to destroy generally all of my former opinions"

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although he very suspiciously gets God and the Catholic Church back on solid foundations

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what's important in contrast to Confucius' approach to learning is that Descartes has attained this knowledge himself and through first principle

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this is an idea that we have in the West: use our internal reason to determine what is true of the world

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there is good reason to think that Descartes' project of rejecting all former knowledge is doomed to failure from the start

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exaggerates the power of reason without substance

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ignores that we are cultural and social animals

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most of what we know is shaped by our cultures and things we learned from the past

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in contrast, Confucius' approach of first internalizing the knowledge of the Zhou dynasty and using that as a basis for thinking, is a more accurate view of how we think, since we have to think in terms of some kind of concepts

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learning in action

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the student is not going to radically come up with new ideas

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but participation is important

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a student is not an empty receptacle but has to take action with the content that is being learned

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Analects 15.16: "I have never been able to do anything for a person who is not himself constantly asking, What should I do, what should I do?"

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you have to be possessed by a thirst for knowledge

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you have to anticipate what you are going to be taught

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Analects 7.8: "I will not open the door for a mind that is not already striving to understand, nor will I provide words to a tongue that is not already struggling to speak. If I hold up on corner of a problem, and the student cannot come back to me with the other three, I will not attempt to instruct him again."

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students should be paying so much attention and be engaged as such a deep level, that they see where their learning is going, this habit is essential to internalize the classics