Whose Tradition? Which DAO?: Confucius and Wittgenstein on Moral Learning and Reflection

342 Pages·2015·4.763 MB·English

by  Peterman, James F.

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
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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 com-
plying with the Way] and use their [examples] to rectify my conduct.”
—Analects 7.22

Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
1 Introduction: A Prologue to an Unlikely Project 1
2 Confucius, Wittgenstein, and the Problem of Moral Disagreement 39
3 Confucius, History, and the Problem of Meaning 69
4 Wittgenstein and the Problem of Understanding at a Distance 95
5 How to Be a Confucian Pragmatist without Losing the Truth 121
6 Saving Confucius from the Confucians 167
7 The Dilemmas of Contemporary Confucianism 185
8 Fingarette on Handshaking 219
9 Acknowledging the Given: Our Complicated Form of
Ritual Life 251
Afterword: The Way Backward or Forward:
Wittgenstein or Confucius? 271
Notes 275
Bibliography 307
Index 315

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 Lud-
wig 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 lib-
eralism 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 consid-
ered 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
ix