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Cultivating the Self in Concert with Others

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Dao Companion to the Analects

Part of the book series: Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy ((DCCP,volume 4))

Abstract

The Analects is a series of glimpses into how Confucius and his students engaged in their projects of moral self-cultivation. This chapter seeks to describe the way in which the outlines of a moral psychology arises from the text and how the text poses issues that came to be central to the Chinese philosophical tradition. It will be argued that the text provides exemplars of moral self-cultivation, that it makes emotion central to virtue and therefore makes emotional self-cultivation a central focus of moral development, that it highlights the relational nature of moral cultivation as a process that is conducted with others, that it raises difficult and crucial issues about the relation between intuitive and affective styles of action on the one hand and on the other hand action based on deliberation and reflection, and that it has some useful approaches to the problem of situationism that has recently been raised for virtue ethics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This chapter employs the Ames and Rosemont 1998 translation of the Analects.

  2. 2.

    See Shun 2002 for his influential characterization of the “definitionalist” interpretation of ren.

  3. 3.

    See, e.g., 7.30: “How could ren be so far away? No sooner do I seek it than it has arrived”.

  4. 4.

    See Tiwald 2010 for a discussion of Dai Zhen’s 戴震 defense of the role of reflection in the Confucian ideal against Neo-Confucians such as Zhu Xi who emphasized the spontaneous.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    David B. Wong

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  1. David B. Wong
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Correspondence to David B. Wong .

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA, Norman, Oklahoma, USA

    Amy Olberding

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Wong, D.B. (2014). Cultivating the Self in Concert with Others. In: Olberding, A. (eds) Dao Companion to the Analects. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7113-0_10

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