The Confucian Gentleman
Episode Stats
Summary
When you think of a gentleman, you probably think about the kind of well-mannered, well-educated, virtuous, self-controlled fellows who lived in England and America during the 19th century. But there is also a not entirely dissimilar conception of the gentleman that grew out of the east, though it arose quite a bit longer ago. This gentleman was described by the Chinese philosopher Confucius in a text called the Analects, which might be thought of as a 2 500-year-old set of advice columns for those who aspire to be exemplary individuals.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast and when you
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think about the word gentleman you probably think about the kind of well-mannered well-educated
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civil virtuous self-controlled fellows who lived in england and america during the 19th century
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but there is also a not entirely dissimilar conception of the gentleman that grew out of
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the east though it arose quite a bit longer ago this gentleman was described by the chinese
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philosopher confucius in a text called the analects which my guest today says might be thought of as
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a 2 500 year old set of advice columns for those who aspire to be exemplary individuals his name is
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robert laflore he's a professor of history and anthropology and a lecturer of the great courses
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course books that matter the analects of confucius today on the show robert talks about how the
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analects are all about learning to rule and that confucius believed that you couldn't lead a state
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without being able to lead your family and you couldn't lead a family without being able to lead
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yourself robert argues that the analects teach the reader how to integrate the kind of character
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traits and relational skills that are required to get good at life how this aptitude centrally
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rests on living with a quality called consummate conduct robert discusses the importance of what
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he calls all in learning to the confucian gentleman the nuance of the idea of filial piety that westerners
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typically miss and the often overlooked check on this hierarchical dynamic called remonstrance we
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enter conversation with why confucius so heavily emphasized the importance of ritual and how rituals hold a
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transformative power that can allow you to become something bigger than yourself after the show's
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over check out our show notes at awim.is slash confucian gentleman
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all right robert laflore welcome to the show thank you very much so you are a professor of history
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anthropology you've specialized in china yes and you did this great series a while back ago for the
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great courses about the analects of confucius now i know a lot of our listeners listening westerners
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they've likely heard of confucius they know who he is but if you ask them you know what did confucius
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say what was his teachings they'd probably draw a blank and that makes sense i mean it's we're westerners
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confucius is from the east but you even make this case that in academic philosophy amongst western
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academic philosophers confucius gets the short shrift even though he's had a pretty big impact
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on human thought what's going on there what do you think why do you think that is yeah it's somewhat
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ironic that every let's just say american for now but every american has heard the name confucius
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there's the old saying about confucius saying confucius says and that is actually by the way how many
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of the entries in the book start the master said and what happened to me early on in my studies
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was what very interesting i was doing my graduate work at the university of chicago and i was chatting
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with a phd student in philosophy and he he just he just stopped in his tracks when i said i was
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systematically studying confucius and he said that's not philosophy you know it's maybe and then with
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dripping dripping sarcasm it's perhaps asian wisdom but it's not philosophy and i think that's where it
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goes i think that's the heart of it he's taught usually as an afterthought if he's required in
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academic philosophy curricula i'm speaking especially of the training of philosophy professors now in grad
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school and a lot of that is because i would argue they don't know how to read the book the book itself
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is extremely hard to read if you muscle through it like it's kant like it's the critique of pure reason
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or even aristotle the closest western equivalent and it's not a terrible one in terms of the actual
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teachings there are great differences but the in terms of the way it's it works it's closer to
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a dialogue of platos than it is to systematic works where there are clear definitions and then you move to
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the next thing and the next thing it fights against our assumption of rationality it also fights against
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the book itself seems to just tangle with us at every step if we take a very western approach like
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that's a contradiction i always say that if you say it's a contradiction that's failure right there
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you've already failed and so it doesn't it resists let me say it resists the urge to muscle through it
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the way you might one of kant's books well let's dig into confucianism what he what he's about so i think to
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understand his teachings and his insights and his philosophy you have to understand the world that
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confucius lived in so let's start there like when was confucius alive when was he teaching and what
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was going on in china at the time that inspired what he was saying and what he was advocating
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confucius lived the dates are 551 to 479 before the common era it's hard with all of these periods
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to target the birth date but his death date is very clearly known as 479 so he lived he lived for
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you know 72 years in a period we now call the spring and autumn period of the eastern joe dynasty
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which lasted for almost a thousand years i mean i'm using very round numbers here and was the dynasty
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before the great integration the great imperial integration of china confucius sensed and made it
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very clear in his teachings that his society was going to as my grandfather used to say to hell in a
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handbasket that things were were bad and they were getting worse families were starting to to
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arrogate certain privileges to themselves that only the king of joe was supposed to have and warfare was
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becoming more intense in this process that i only half jokingly tell my students to memorize as what i call
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the joe dynasty 200 to 100 to 50 to 20 i'm talking about the states here um to seven of them to
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two of them and finally to one integrated empire and this process of unification is often spoken of as
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a wonderful thing now we have an integrated china and the like confucius saw it differently he liked
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the fragmentation he liked the states living peacefully side by side and he sensed that a much
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more terrible period was coming on society was breaking down and he sought to help to fix it
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i was gonna say he's living around the same time as like plato aristotle yeah yeah yeah okay yeah no it's
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interesting when you you know span out and you look and see the kind of the global interactions i mean
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it's interesting historically to look at that through many periods in this case yes plato aristotle were
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thriving in in in their own part of the world and so it sounds like there was some turmoil beginning
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to happen in in chinese political life and chinese culture and i think it's interesting too that same
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sort of thing was happening in the west with plato and like in greece there's a lot of political entry
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going on a lot of turmoil uh conflict yes and a lot of the philosophy that's happening with plato and
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aristotle was a kind of a response to that and it sounds like the same thing was happening with
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confucius absolutely and one of the things that's often said of this period broadly speaking i mean
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it's really the the period that follows which ironically it was called the warring states period
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that there's nothing ironic about that part but ironically enough what we today call philosophy coming
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out of that period and it's not unlike what you're saying with greece and that part of the world
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is it really was as a very fine title of a book about this era states they were disputers of the
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dao disputers of the way they were in conversation but it was a martial conversation of sorts and so
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what we call philosophy of that period on some level every single word of it this is what one of my first
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teachers told us in graduate school and it was a surprise to us almost every single word you're
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reading whether it's confucius or other thinkers juangza and and others han fei these are names that of
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that of that period is it was about ruling on some level now i know i think you can take that too far
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but on some level everything you're reading was about how do you manage a state and confucius argued
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very strongly that you can't manage a state unless you can manage a family and then from there on down
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you can't manage a family unless you can manage yourself and this integration this this integration of
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self family and society or what chinese called have called dubbed since that all through history
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all under heaven the whole shebang the whole works unless you can manage yourself and your family
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you have no chance of managing the rest and just one quick thing back to the the idea of why
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westerners uh western philosophy has not taken this as seriously it's because many many not all not all
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but many many western philosophers have either used the to use an example the telescope big picture or
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the microscope they've looked they've looked at life from the the minute all the way to the
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massive picture confucius and i make say this in the the televised lectures confucius stated that he didn't
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state it exactly but the but the idea is the intellects are about getting good at life i like and that getting
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good at life is something that of course western philosophy has aspired to that but it's funny when you look at
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the great works of philosophy that it's it's not attacked as directly perhaps as it is in confucius's
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writings well okay so you mentioned the analytics that's attributed to confucius but exactly right but
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it's interesting like he's like he's like a lot of other famous philosophical or spiritual teachers
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confucius we don't actually have anything written by confucius himself it's basically the analytics is a
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collection that was compiled together by his students later on correct correct he didn't write a word of
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it he is said to have written been in at the hands of almost every important work of that era but that
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is kind of a later mythologization we don't have any evidence that he wrote these other works any actual
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strong evidence so it was put together over 500 years as a process by students by students of students
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and there's a lot of what academics like to say i really don't like this word a lot of distanciation
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going on there that in other words none of his students you know wrote until later in their lives when
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they were teachers and then it was their students and their students and it was is almost like a
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little at first a little cabal of confucians who then built through their own followers something
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in a text that changed and was adapted we're learning this from archaeology all the way for about 500 years
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until around the beginning of our era of the common era and then we have the text in the order that we
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see it today and is this i mean the reason why this sort of the way it was put together is this why
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sometimes when you read the analytics i've read the analogs a few times and sometimes like this sounds
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kind of cryptic some yeah as you said sometimes contradictory is it because of the way it was compiled
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together or was was there something else going on there no that's definitely part of it and we've
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learned this in other words we're living through a spectacularly interesting time right now in terms of
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archaeology because what's coming from the ground it's not just axles you know and spearheads and all
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those kinds of things what's coming from the ground is texts and we're finding out but for example in 200
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bce there's a text of the analogs and it's completely organized in a different fashion some of the
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what we would call in english words are different and so so we now know we for for 2 000 years people
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didn't know this but we now know that the text took a long time to come together into the form we have
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ironically enough that hasn't made it more kind of what what a westerner might say rationally
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organized and so a friend of mine long story that i start the lecture series with is a colleague at
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a conference said that it's almost like 500 sayings and that's that's about right it's about 500
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statements in the analogs it's as though they dropped from the sky and then were just hurriedly
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shoved into 20 chapters and so it looks incredibly haphazard and i'm not trying to make
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an argument that too common in the west that you just kind of force a unity onto it to to make it
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you know a strongly unified argument as though that it just has to be that way i do argue in a very
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different way that there is a set of unified messages but that we have to change the way we look
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at it and i quote my great professor at a greek specialist by the way who translated herodotus
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the great historian named david green g-r-e-n-e david green at the university of chicago would always
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tell us that you can't read shakespeare you should not read shakespeare without always always envisioning
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the stage to the extent that you're reading words and you're checking sources and all of those kinds
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of things you are you are losing that key connection he's right about shakespeare i would argue as well
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but for confucius all of a sudden later on years later it hit me that professor green was right and
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that it's the same with confucius by trying to read it like we read heidegger or aristotle what we're
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failing what we have to understand is how and we all we all know this the how the pace of how a classroom
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works and so if you start on book one and you start reading and you imagine the give and take of a gifted
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teacher and a class over the course of a long very rigorous semester what you start to see is a topic
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comes up and it's debated from one perspective and then you move on to other things and then the topic
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if it's really important comes up again and then you see another perspective where he's dealing with another
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student maybe someone who's a little headstrong and then he the message seems to be a little bit different
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and then you go on and on and on and over the course of 16 weeks or perhaps it's a year-long course
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or a much longer one maybe it's it's just all the courses you take over your life is that what happens
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is that you start to develop deeper thinking about many topics because you have as we might say hit the
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knowledge muscle in all kinds of different directions that's the analytics and that is the
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way to appreciate it and not to be frustrated by this by this this this seeming skipping around
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okay so when you're reading it imagine you're in a classroom imagine you're in a classroom with a
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gifted teacher and and students who are quite varying um some who are timid some who are headstrong in
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other words just like any classroom you've ever been in and all of a sudden it starts to make more
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sense when certain topics come up and and one of them then compassion a consummate conduct and
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compassion comes up very often that you start to see it in all kinds of different ways it's confusing
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it's like a good discussion class it seems confusing at first and then it finally comes together
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okay so you said earlier the whole point of the analects and what confusion was trying to do is
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trying to show people how to live a good life which could eventually lead to individuals knowing how to
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lead well if that was what part of their life no no he explicitly in his case that is exactly the point and
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i would characterize it slightly differently as getting good at life getting good at life um you
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know the good life it does have at least echoes of the greeks and and he he's not against that i
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wouldn't i wouldn't argue that but but it's getting good at life okay so the analytics is about getting
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good at life in a social context and the big part of that is living with consummate conduct and
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confucius talks about this but he talks about it but it's a hard thing to define
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so first off why is it so hard to define and then what would be a good working definition for us
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for consummate conduct the idea is that this has been very difficult to translate and legitimately so
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number one because it's such a straightforward simple character it appears so often it's the core
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the the real core activity character that you find in the and i say character meaning chinese word
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okay but word in the dialects and the idea is that it's about being good so one translation benevolence
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okay that's not wrong the problem with translating is you have to pick a word or at least a small cluster
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of words for a chinese character that has a semantic field that is voluminous that encompasses
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three four five six seven eight english words this is one reason i read shakespeare so much because
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as a translator it's just like i need more words um you know i want to at least envision the range the
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field around one of these chinese characters and so benevolence is one that's been used humanity
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another good one it's not wrong you know be a consummate person we say in english that's that's the best one
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i think so far but be be a benevolent person be a humanistic person well that's tricky there's one translator
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in the 1930s who who translated it as man being at his best so be man being at his best okay that gets a
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little clumsy in english if i could translate it in the following way this is how i would do it i would
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call it social moral ethical virtuosity and the most important words there are social and virtuosity
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and i mean a i mean a virtuoso i mean the kind you we all know maybe you can't name it right now the
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person right now but we all know people like this who are so good they flow through life and and they
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influence others there's a there's a power to their goodness and and it's not just about you know being
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good and behaving it's about influencing others having the capacity to transform a family through one's
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social actions the capacity to transform one's company or even the broader electorate you know on that
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is that is ren that is consummate conduct this has been translated in all kinds of ways this translation that i think
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very highly of translates it as authoritative conduct that's a good translation the problem is americans
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read it as authoritarian conduct even though that's not what's being said it what's being said is the
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capacity to be good and to to convey that in one's actions to the point where others are transformed
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you know the whole idea of transformative goodness which isn't isn't a bad translation now that i say
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that i might write that down okay so just to clarify so a yeah an exemplary person is someone who has or
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like a gentleman it's often translated like that yeah is someone who lives with consummate conduct
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yeah okay yeah someone who lives and and that means complete and there are all kinds of other things
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that are embedded in that being trustworthy being being um you know exerting your effort in
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loyalty that's not the perfect translation but but all but there's there's all kinds of other
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concepts that appear through the analogs that are kind of under the umbrella of consummate conduct this is
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this is the king of the concepts gotcha and and i like i want to reiterate that point about when you have
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consummate contact you have social virtuosity and as as i was listening to that part it reminded me i mean
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i keep doing this because i'm most familiar with him is it reminds me of aristotle and his idea of
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i guess prudence you know like a a virtuous person knows what the right thing is to do at the right time
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for the right reason in the right state it's it's very situational is is confucius the same way it's
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like his ethics is often very socially situational exactly the situational nature of it is often
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ironically given aristotle's you know approach but is is often what trips up western readers because he
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is targeting lessons and so it's very much i mean how one acts at any particular time you can't create
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just a rule for it so there's a french social thinker that i'm inclined to teach very often
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and his name is pierre bourgeois lived from 1930 to 2006 and one of the things he describes is what he
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calls situational mastery or a feel for the game and and this is the french word you you know where where
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game isn't a competition as much as it's a it's a situation that requires strategy and he describes
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that human beings spend a lot of time creating rules but they're not really rules we find ways
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around them and to deal with them in different ways and anyone who's a teacher who's set attendance
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policies knows this but everyone knows it on some level you know a parent a parent rules for teenagers
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okay and so so the idea is how do you deal how do you influence in different situations in different
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changing situations and with the analects this is the power of the classroom teaching rather than
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one big strong definition of this is what consummate conduct is rather you work through it to the point
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where you get to many you see it in many different situations so one of the classic entries in the
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analects is where one student says how should i behave and he said you should i paraphrase of course
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you should go for it and then the next student comes in and says the same question asks the same question
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what should i do you should defer to your brothers and your father you know and then the third person comes in
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and says two people just asked you the same question and you answered them differently
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and he said so and so is headstrong and i needed to hold him back a little bit
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okay think as a parent think as a teacher of the idea of whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa before you commit
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you know two eight years for a phd or something okay take it take a take a breath someone else is
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really timid go for it go for it he is tailoring the messages and if we're if we're reading and trying
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to force an integrated message onto the text we will fail to see that we should be learning from those
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different situations and so so i mean it's maddening that there's no definition but if you patiently
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work through the text then start over and work back through the text all of a sudden this dynamic
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of different situations different personalities and different again social relational kind of
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i'll go back to the very fine word you're using situations appear and it's almost like again
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one thing i say in the lectures is is it's almost like reading a 2500 year old set of advice columns
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and paying attention to the questions and the answers we're gonna take a quick break for a word
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from our sponsors and now back to the show so part of becoming this is simply a person this gentleman
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that lives with constant conduct one of the things that confucius talks a lot about is you have to
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develop a love of learning yeah so what exactly are you supposed to love like what is what's this
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what's the object of study for a confucian gentleman for confucius it was books i i'm not i'm not going to
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deny that and no book was more important than the book of songs the classic of poetry is another
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translation that's been used and the like a collection of poems that people have argued over the years
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are about all of these lessons it's an extraordinarily important text that i i do teach in my teaching as
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well so so in other words it's not an argument for for that just just learn from life and don't read
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i would say the most important thing is that you you have to be all in so in one of the lectures and
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this one's on youtube and at least a couple of the commenters uh did not understand why i did this
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but i refer to a sociologist named c right mills who in his sociological imagination a classic work
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from 1957 and still read today and for good reason is he argues that to be a technician you have to read
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the books and do what the book says and we both know we all know that we need technicians in the
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world if i'm getting an mri i want a skilled technician but he said no there's another level
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which is imagination you have to be all in you have to not check out at the end of the day you have to
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be thinking all the time and you need to be like seeing one thing in a book and then another in life
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and putting them together that's part of the creativity of becoming an exemplary person what
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sometimes translated as you said as gentlemen because you put it together from books and life
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and there's a great story that sums this all up a person i've studied my whole life named sima guang
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who lived from 10 19 to 10 85 of our era and he as a young child was said to have been a little bookworm
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studying in his study reading the great texts of by that time 1500 years after confucius the great works
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of confucianism and he was studying away while all the other kids played in the courtyard all of a sudden
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there are cries from the courtyard a little child was drowning having played hide and seek and crawled
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into a big urn that happened to have had rain water in it and he was drowning and all the children who
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had more experience in the real world so-called were at a loss of what to do as their as their friend
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was drowning little suma put down his book ran out grabbed a rock broke the vase and saved the child
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this story has been told for a thousand years it's on postage stamps it's on um any you ask anyone in
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china they know this story and um but the idea as i see it is even further than that it's the very
00:30:20.560
picture of the reader moving in the phrase of one of my other professors in chicago paul ricord
00:30:28.320
the french was all philosopher who said to move from text to action that's the heart of it to be a learner
00:30:37.480
was to make that move from your books to the world and that's why i bring in the idea of being
00:30:46.240
all in not i study until five o'clock and then i'm done it's you're always thinking you're all
00:30:54.640
everything is studied and i would say in our own world it's the same equivalent that you're always
00:31:00.680
thinking you're always processing you go to a baseball game and you start thinking about how life works and
00:31:09.300
all these different kinds of things that's what confucius wanted and again was something i call being all
00:31:15.380
in okay so book study is important but make sure you apply it to your life don't just be a bookworm
00:31:20.960
another important alone alone right yeah and another important part of training to become an exemplary
00:31:28.520
person is this idea of filial piety i think if i think a lot of westerners if they were to ask you
00:31:35.060
know hey what's what's confucianism about it's like well it's just respect to your your parents and
00:31:38.700
your elders yeah but can you dig deeper to that like what what role did filial piety play
00:31:43.700
in the development of consummate conduct the the fascinating thing is is how difficult this is to
00:31:51.260
teach western students because the message can be read as a very tinny one where it's listen to your
00:32:00.900
elders do what they say and i'm not saying that that's entirely wrong in confucius's thinking
00:32:10.280
and in chinese thinking over the ages more generally but what confucius is ultimately arguing
00:32:17.220
for and and this principle by the way this principle of filiality or filial conduct as i like to
00:32:23.720
translate it but the word piety is is a problematic because it's it's so much a product of the early
00:32:31.280
missionary translators and of course there's nothing wrong with the word piety but it has come to take
00:32:37.140
on certain meanings in english that are tricky not unlike authoritative and other other words that
00:32:44.680
have a funny ring to them for westerners but to have filial conduct is to act effortlessly in a world
00:32:53.320
of hierarchy and so one of the things i stress and this is extraordinarily hard for americans while my
00:33:01.200
students and i've you know taught in germany and france and china and japan and one of the things that
00:33:07.560
i find that all my students outside the united states seem to understand this more more readily than
00:33:14.820
americans but that is that a hierarchical system can work argues confucius and you play your role
00:33:25.760
and so the idea is is confucius almost shouts not not literally but it's it echoes through the
00:33:32.820
intellects act your role and it's about learning to be within different roles in a hierarchy
00:33:39.780
and the hierarchy then is not yes sir yes ma'am that whole thing but rather a powerful integrative force
00:33:49.940
where as as one great chinese source from again the same era about 1500 years after confucius says why
00:33:58.600
would you want to play the same note all the time what in other words you have to understand hierarchy
00:34:06.000
as the notes on a scale and when they're played in in unison and when they're played in order all of a
00:34:14.420
sudden they become great harmony and and so that's the way of thinking again americans tend to be and
00:34:21.080
and there are some very good reasons for this including how i feel is it you know this can be
00:34:26.280
taken this can be misunderstood very easily and authoritarian governments have no problem taking
00:34:33.960
over this message of act your role and you're not in charge but but the teachings of the analytics i would
00:34:40.860
argue are about something else they're about they're about the power of hierarchical integration and
00:34:49.500
and americans and i'll just say one last thing here is americans are tend to be i should say again
00:34:56.020
extraordinarily resistant to the idea of of difference in society and what i like to say is talk about
00:35:03.900
cycling and i love to i love everything about cycling and my life shuts down in july for the tour de france
00:35:10.680
and the idea is every cyclist knows about what's called false flats it looks flat but it rises or falls
00:35:19.920
ever so gently and if you're in the wrong gear you're in 43rd place instead of battling for the win
00:35:26.360
and too many americans see flatness and an absolute equality in terms of social kind of the social
00:35:35.920
situation where there are undulations and confucius was was saying in many ways just assuming in his
00:35:45.160
world that there are undulations and that that when it when it's casual friday that be careful
00:35:53.440
be careful of your attire be careful when the boss says you know call me bob you know all of these
00:36:01.540
different kinds of things that there are undulations and he's trying to attune people to the undulations
00:36:08.900
and how to act in your role and the idea finally is that yeah you may be the younger brother at some
00:36:16.340
time but then you're going to be a father at another time and you're going to be you know and at some
00:36:22.320
point you're going to take over the family rituals and and all of these different kinds of things and so
00:36:27.100
throughout our lives we take over different roles and it's knowing how to act in the role finally
00:36:36.500
and i mean really finally is you have you have i always say we're almost always under secretary of
00:36:44.200
something we're almost never secretary of and and you know i'm using the american idiom for government
00:36:49.900
but we're almost always under secretaries you know managers this or that that handling your boss
00:36:58.080
you know is a role and then but then learning to take over authority at some point is also the role
00:37:06.700
that is taught through filial conduct and so you learn filial conduct you you get good at life
00:37:12.960
and you get good at knowing the varying roles of some deference with teaching to authority and its
00:37:23.220
responsibilities that you will have over the course of a life so it's all about becoming that social
00:37:28.560
virtuoso exactly and the virtuoso again i've got to you know underline that the virtuoso has incredible
00:37:36.420
think of yo-yo ma okay incredible yeah at the cello incredible talent there's there's individual we could
00:37:44.920
look at just individual talent there and in a solo absolutely but put that talent in an orchestra and then you
00:37:54.520
have the power the virtuoso power of a great symphony life is like the symphony and the virtuoso is the
00:38:05.100
person who has a a real power you i'm not saying conductor i'm saying the virtuoso who's who's the
00:38:11.640
instrumentalist has a real transformative power in an important part of filial conduct filial duty
00:38:19.740
typically when you said americans hear that they think okay you just have to do whatever your mom
00:38:23.680
and dad says or what your elders say no matter what but like there's an important part you highlight
00:38:27.480
in your lectures is this idea of remonstrance yes which allowed for some back and forth can you talk
00:38:32.780
about remonstrance a bit yeah the chinese character is an interesting one in its own right and it's like
00:38:37.980
words on the on the left side and kind of a bundle on on the right and and and i often call remonstrance
00:38:47.500
a word by the way that in china and japan i've lectured on this topic i've studied this topic for 30
00:38:53.720
years is in china and japan just like in the united states the word remonstrance or it's chinese or
00:39:01.420
japanese or korean equivalents is not a word that's that people can easily define you know it's sometimes
00:39:08.920
meant as to exhort people you know to to you know do better you know exhorting people but the basic
00:39:15.540
principle in east asia it's used a little bit differently in the west but the basic principle
00:39:21.480
is this in a hierarchical system it is not just the privilege it is the duty the duty of the junior
00:39:33.460
member of a hierarchy to correct and critique a more senior member the student corrects the teacher
00:39:44.200
the child corrects the parent the middle level manager corrects the upper level manager or ceo
00:39:52.240
it's an extraordinary responsibility and a very difficult one in practice we got anyone who reads
00:40:00.920
the news or has read to just live through the history of presidencies and i think about you know
00:40:06.640
someone who has been at it for a while that presidents often say oh i want people who will
00:40:14.200
talk back to me who will correct me who will who will say no i don't agree in practice if you look
00:40:21.420
at administrations through even my lifetime people don't like to be corrected authority doesn't like
00:40:27.200
to be stopped but it's it's a duty and i call it the forgotten principle of the like the 20 basic
00:40:34.960
philosophical principles in chinese life it's it's the one that's been left aside the most and there are
00:40:41.980
reasons for that early chinese kings and emperors did not like to be corrected and yet this principle
00:40:49.140
has remained all the way to the present i once had a young woman in tokyo tell me at wasada university
00:40:56.680
where i was giving a talk and she said this is really interesting but we don't have that in japan we
00:41:02.120
just do whatever the authority says and i said of course very politely i said of course you have it in japan
00:41:09.320
you know all the books have been written over the ages but but it tends to be the forgotten
00:41:16.960
principle but it's all important filial conduct the hierarchy won't work unless the junior is gently
00:41:24.600
correcting the senior and the way you correct is to say or imply that you already know this in other
00:41:32.040
words it's not like i don't agree to this completely different thing it's like you know what to do you've
00:41:37.820
strayed from it you know the mission of the corporation you've strayed from it and again
00:41:45.560
it's extraordinarily difficult to do in practice why are you going to be the person who criticizes
00:41:51.000
the boss and probably gets in trouble and yet the company will fail if you don't so i imagine an
00:41:59.240
exemplary person is one who knows how to provide that critique exactly but also an exemplary person if
00:42:05.620
they're in the superior position will know how to accept the critique that's the hard part yeah but
00:42:11.720
that's exactly right and so it's the idea of the person in authority and that's why i say learning
00:42:19.240
different roles is what filial conduct is about because when you're in that role there's again a
00:42:27.300
great when you're in the upper role the upper echelon there's a responsibility and it's not just the
00:42:33.580
responsibility to make decisions it's a responsibility to take in that critique and to
00:42:41.060
reform one's thinking to clarify one's thinking and so so every role has a responsibility and you're
00:42:49.400
going to play many many many different roles during your life including multiple ones at the same time
00:42:54.640
you're both a you're both a child and a parent at some point in many many lives all those kinds of
00:43:00.680
things so one last thing i'd like to talk about an important part of confucianism is the role of
00:43:05.660
ritual and it seemed like confucius is a a stickler for ritual yeah which is interesting because you
00:43:11.160
know we've been talking about the way he talks about sociality it's very flexible and you have to know
00:43:14.620
what the right thing to do in in the situation situations can change but he i mean sometimes he
00:43:19.300
can come off as very rigid about ritual what's going on there yeah it's it's very interesting
00:43:24.920
because it's true that he he you know he he argues for for the you know the centrality of ritual in life
00:43:33.100
and he means doing the ritual exactly as it's intended to use a stage analogy to read your words
00:43:42.480
exactly and yet and and so so again another thing that americans tend to rebel at if you say ritual it's
00:43:50.900
like oh my god you know following all the rules but the idea is we do ritual all the time and he does
00:43:58.340
describe a kind of spontaneity and early on i couldn't get this message either uh most of my
00:44:05.140
graduate peers and i thought that confucius was just a big bore and and it was a a little book that i do
00:44:12.460
recommend it's widely available if people look for it and it's called confucius the secular as sacred
00:44:19.140
by herbert fingerette is the title but the what all of a sudden is that fingerette describes
00:44:25.700
a handshake i reach out my hand you reach yours up to mine you know all of a sudden we have this social
00:44:33.480
accord this social rapport that wasn't there before with just this tiny tiny ritual ask anyone from east
00:44:42.780
asia and they say oh my god handshaking is really difficult i don't know how to do it and yet it
00:44:49.660
seems effortless if you grow up in the culture flash over to east asia and my experience there
00:44:55.400
bowing i once bowed to an animated atm figure i didn't know i was doing it i was just bowing and
00:45:02.620
then next thing i knew i looked around it's like oh my god it just bowed to an atm but bowing is just
00:45:07.500
a natural part of chinese japanese and korean society that one almost doesn't think about those
00:45:13.920
are rituals and even in more elaborate rituals there is the idea of if you just read your words
00:45:21.580
again think of the stage if you just read your words you're not going to be an effective actor we
00:45:27.280
all know how tinny that sounds radio local radio commercials that where it's obvious that the dialogue
00:45:35.020
that's supposed to be happening is just two people reading and it fails the distraction is so great
00:45:41.120
you forget what the ad is for that's a failure that's a ritual failure or a right bomb like a photo
00:45:47.280
bomb and and but the idea is to do a ritual according to all the prescribed steps which throughout chinese
00:45:55.520
history they were all written down but with such aplomb and with such skill we forget that we're watching
00:46:02.480
a ritual as we see this melodic harmonious set of actions come together think of great actors
00:46:13.200
and the spontaneity and all that happens there and so that's that's ritual to confucius and it's like
00:46:23.280
yep there are things written down and you've got to do them just like an actor with lines but written
00:46:29.520
by good writers okay and it has to seem as though you're not going through a set of actions that is
00:46:37.520
ritual for confucius okay so i guess the idea is you got to study the stuff really hard practice it a lot
00:46:43.020
so that it eventually just becomes effortless and you appear like a virtuoso like you're not even
00:46:47.200
thinking about it you are a virtuoso and your performance it's performative but not in this cynical
00:46:54.960
way we often think of that word it's performative it's embodied it's enacted and from there it's
00:47:03.280
transformational one last thing about this is that there's this integrative power of ritual that has a
00:47:10.240
coming together and so one of the great french sociologists emile durkheim who lived from 1858 to
00:47:16.180
1917 he described that humanity needs to be renewed periodically and that that all sociality and all
00:47:25.160
the power of society comes from these periodic renewals and people come together they're re-energized
00:47:32.400
ritual for confucius is like that it's an integrative power that has a it lasts but it has to be reenacted
00:47:41.560
because it it starts to wane and so the power of ritual is the integrative power and of course if
00:47:49.760
you have a ritual where it's just a bomb i give a quick example in the lectures of you know the
00:47:55.940
president of the college reading an honorary degree we're all listening we're all in the middle of the
00:48:00.760
ritual we're used to it and all of a sudden he mispronounces a basic word and all of a sudden the
00:48:06.500
whole thing is destroyed the the dream is broken that happened you know i in my experience and
00:48:12.460
that's where i start to see the integrative power and also how it can go wrong so you need to be a
00:48:20.560
virtuoso and if you mispronounce something you've got to find a way to reenact it to get the get the
00:48:27.040
ritual back as you were describing that i made me think of trying to make it related to my life i think
00:48:32.360
we've all those experiences where maybe you go to like a nice dinner party and you're just like you
00:48:38.760
just do everything right like you do you practice all the laws of etiquette the rules of etiquette that
00:48:42.420
you know but it's like seamless and flawless and like there is something it's ennobling you feel
00:48:47.540
good about yourself and you feel good about the people around you and you feel good about the whole
00:48:51.420
situation when everyone's trying their best to like work together to make this thing a night to
00:48:56.840
remember and it's a night to remember and it's a great social it's a great integrative
00:49:01.920
social experience where people become and again i'm echoing this french thinker emil durkheim
00:49:08.560
where you become more than yourself that it works so well that at least temporarily you are snatched
00:49:16.940
away from these are his words the monotony of your daily life to to something different and bigger and
00:49:26.040
he calls that society and i believe confucius is is saying something very similar that that kind of
00:49:32.960
virtuosity leads to that kind of dinner party experience and others that you just described
00:49:39.580
well robert this has been a great conversation is there some place people can go to learn more about
00:49:43.540
your work yeah it's kind of funny because i'm in the middle of a of a huge array of things that'll be
00:49:49.440
coming out in the next year or so including translating this french thinker and a thousand
00:49:54.800
pages of his stuff so i have a lot of stuff that'll be coming out soon including my translation of
00:50:00.520
confucius which even with the editing process it could be 2023 but but it's it's going to be it's coming
00:50:07.120
with a lot of the things in the translation that i've been talking about today behind it in any case
00:50:13.460
my blog is not a bad place to start and so it's called round and square and you probably can find
00:50:19.920
it by just searching round and square but it's also and this is a sign of when um blogs were really a
00:50:27.080
bigger thing is it's just robert lafleur.blogspot.com it's eventually going to go be going to a website
00:50:34.600
but but for now it's at that address and i would say to anyone because because i i you know i email me
00:50:42.140
you know it's just lafleur at beloit.edu it's pretty straightforward and i'm happy to correspond
00:50:49.960
and send some things that aren't published yet and all kinds of things i'm very happy to talk with
00:50:56.080
people fantastic well robert lafleur thanks for his time it's been a pleasure yeah it's been a pleasure
00:51:00.260
thank you my guest today was robert lafleur he's the lecturer of the great courses course called books
00:51:05.360
that matter the analytics of confucius you can find that at the great courses plus or now it's called
00:51:09.840
wonderium you can also find out more information about robert's work at his website robert-lafleur.blogspot.com
00:51:16.180
also check out our show notes at aom.is slash confucian gentleman where you can find links to
00:51:21.760
well that wraps up another edition of the a1 podcast make sure to check out our art of manless
00:51:33.160
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until next time this is brett mckay remind you to listen to the a1 podcast but put what you've heard