The Art of Manliness - The Confucian Gentleman

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast and when you

00:00:11.200 think about the word gentleman you probably think about the kind of well-mannered well-educated

00:00:14.880 civil virtuous self-controlled fellows who lived in england and america during the 19th century

00:00:20.160 but there is also a not entirely dissimilar conception of the gentleman that grew out of

00:00:23.840 the east though it arose quite a bit longer ago this gentleman was described by the chinese

00:00:28.360 philosopher confucius in a text called the analects which my guest today says might be thought of as

00:00:32.960 a 2 500 year old set of advice columns for those who aspire to be exemplary individuals his name is

00:00:39.200 robert laflore he's a professor of history and anthropology and a lecturer of the great courses

00:00:43.020 course books that matter the analects of confucius today on the show robert talks about how the

00:00:47.280 analects are all about learning to rule and that confucius believed that you couldn't lead a state

00:00:51.760 without being able to lead your family and you couldn't lead a family without being able to lead

00:00:56.420 yourself robert argues that the analects teach the reader how to integrate the kind of character

00:01:00.200 traits and relational skills that are required to get good at life how this aptitude centrally

00:01:05.220 rests on living with a quality called consummate conduct robert discusses the importance of what

00:01:09.320 he calls all in learning to the confucian gentleman the nuance of the idea of filial piety that westerners

00:01:14.460 typically miss and the often overlooked check on this hierarchical dynamic called remonstrance we

00:01:18.980 enter conversation with why confucius so heavily emphasized the importance of ritual and how rituals hold a

00:01:23.780 transformative power that can allow you to become something bigger than yourself after the show's

00:01:28.440 over check out our show notes at awim.is slash confucian gentleman

00:01:31.580 all right robert laflore welcome to the show thank you very much so you are a professor of history

00:01:49.920 anthropology you've specialized in china yes and you did this great series a while back ago for the

00:01:56.360 great courses about the analects of confucius now i know a lot of our listeners listening westerners

00:02:02.840 they've likely heard of confucius they know who he is but if you ask them you know what did confucius

00:02:07.880 say what was his teachings they'd probably draw a blank and that makes sense i mean it's we're westerners

00:02:12.660 confucius is from the east but you even make this case that in academic philosophy amongst western

00:02:18.860 academic philosophers confucius gets the short shrift even though he's had a pretty big impact

00:02:23.540 on human thought what's going on there what do you think why do you think that is yeah it's somewhat

00:02:27.980 ironic that every let's just say american for now but every american has heard the name confucius

00:02:34.900 there's the old saying about confucius saying confucius says and that is actually by the way how many

00:02:41.820 of the entries in the book start the master said and what happened to me early on in my studies

00:02:49.480 was what very interesting i was doing my graduate work at the university of chicago and i was chatting

00:02:54.520 with a phd student in philosophy and he he just he just stopped in his tracks when i said i was

00:03:02.280 systematically studying confucius and he said that's not philosophy you know it's maybe and then with

00:03:10.480 dripping dripping sarcasm it's perhaps asian wisdom but it's not philosophy and i think that's where it

00:03:20.540 goes i think that's the heart of it he's taught usually as an afterthought if he's required in

00:03:28.200 academic philosophy curricula i'm speaking especially of the training of philosophy professors now in grad

00:03:35.080 school and a lot of that is because i would argue they don't know how to read the book the book itself

00:03:42.120 is extremely hard to read if you muscle through it like it's kant like it's the critique of pure reason 1.00

00:03:49.600 or even aristotle the closest western equivalent and it's not a terrible one in terms of the actual

00:03:57.480 teachings there are great differences but the in terms of the way it's it works it's closer to

00:04:05.500 a dialogue of platos than it is to systematic works where there are clear definitions and then you move to

00:04:15.640 the next thing and the next thing it fights against our assumption of rationality it also fights against

00:04:22.820 the book itself seems to just tangle with us at every step if we take a very western approach like

00:04:29.880 that's a contradiction i always say that if you say it's a contradiction that's failure right there

00:04:36.040 you've already failed and so it doesn't it resists let me say it resists the urge to muscle through it

00:04:44.700 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

00:04:51.500 understand his teachings and his insights and his philosophy you have to understand the world that

00:04:56.800 confucius lived in so let's start there like when was confucius alive when was he teaching and what

00:05:02.300 was going on in china at the time that inspired what he was saying and what he was advocating

00:05:08.300 confucius lived the dates are 551 to 479 before the common era it's hard with all of these periods

00:05:18.280 to target the birth date but his death date is very clearly known as 479 so he lived he lived for

00:05:27.040 you know 72 years in a period we now call the spring and autumn period of the eastern joe dynasty

00:05:37.180 which lasted for almost a thousand years i mean i'm using very round numbers here and was the dynasty

00:05:45.160 before the great integration the great imperial integration of china confucius sensed and made it

00:05:53.620 very clear in his teachings that his society was going to as my grandfather used to say to hell in a

00:06:01.860 handbasket that things were were bad and they were getting worse families were starting to to

00:06:08.800 arrogate certain privileges to themselves that only the king of joe was supposed to have and warfare was

00:06:18.860 becoming more intense in this process that i only half jokingly tell my students to memorize as what i call

00:06:28.520 the joe dynasty 200 to 100 to 50 to 20 i'm talking about the states here um to seven of them to

00:06:38.560 two of them and finally to one integrated empire and this process of unification is often spoken of as

00:06:47.200 a wonderful thing now we have an integrated china and the like confucius saw it differently he liked

00:06:53.800 the fragmentation he liked the states living peacefully side by side and he sensed that a much

00:07:02.240 more terrible period was coming on society was breaking down and he sought to help to fix it

00:07:10.320 i was gonna say he's living around the same time as like plato aristotle yeah yeah yeah okay yeah no it's

00:07:17.480 interesting when you you know span out and you look and see the kind of the global interactions i mean

00:07:24.340 it's interesting historically to look at that through many periods in this case yes plato aristotle were

00:07:29.740 thriving in in in their own part of the world and so it sounds like there was some turmoil beginning

00:07:36.320 to happen in in chinese political life and chinese culture and i think it's interesting too that same

00:07:42.220 sort of thing was happening in the west with plato and like in greece there's a lot of political entry

00:07:47.960 going on a lot of turmoil uh conflict yes and a lot of the philosophy that's happening with plato and

00:07:53.780 aristotle was a kind of a response to that and it sounds like the same thing was happening with

00:07:57.400 confucius absolutely and one of the things that's often said of this period broadly speaking i mean

00:08:05.440 it's really the the period that follows which ironically it was called the warring states period

00:08:11.220 that there's nothing ironic about that part but ironically enough what we today call philosophy coming

00:08:17.620 out of that period and it's not unlike what you're saying with greece and that part of the world

00:08:22.640 is it really was as a very fine title of a book about this era states they were disputers of the

00:08:32.320 dao disputers of the way they were in conversation but it was a martial conversation of sorts and so

00:08:43.140 what we call philosophy of that period on some level every single word of it this is what one of my first

00:08:50.140 teachers told us in graduate school and it was a surprise to us almost every single word you're

00:08:55.840 reading whether it's confucius or other thinkers juangza and and others han fei these are names that of

00:09:03.600 that of that period is it was about ruling on some level now i know i think you can take that too far

00:09:12.660 but on some level everything you're reading was about how do you manage a state and confucius argued

00:09:22.940 very strongly that you can't manage a state unless you can manage a family and then from there on down

00:09:31.620 you can't manage a family unless you can manage yourself and this integration this this integration of

00:09:40.220 self family and society or what chinese called have called dubbed since that all through history

00:09:48.020 all under heaven the whole shebang the whole works unless you can manage yourself and your family

00:09:57.260 you have no chance of managing the rest and just one quick thing back to the the idea of why

00:10:05.900 westerners uh western philosophy has not taken this as seriously it's because many many not all not all

00:10:14.000 but many many western philosophers have either used the to use an example the telescope big picture or

00:10:23.900 the microscope they've looked they've looked at life from the the minute all the way to the

00:10:31.900 massive picture confucius and i make say this in the the televised lectures confucius stated that he didn't

00:10:41.180 state it exactly but the but the idea is the intellects are about getting good at life i like and that getting

00:10:49.100 good at life is something that of course western philosophy has aspired to that but it's funny when you look at

00:10:57.240 the great works of philosophy that it's it's not attacked as directly perhaps as it is in confucius's

00:11:06.600 writings well okay so you mentioned the analytics that's attributed to confucius but exactly right but

00:11:13.480 it's interesting like he's like he's like a lot of other famous philosophical or spiritual teachers

00:11:18.320 confucius we don't actually have anything written by confucius himself it's basically the analytics is a

00:11:23.560 collection that was compiled together by his students later on correct correct he didn't write a word of

00:11:30.400 it he is said to have written been in at the hands of almost every important work of that era but that

00:11:39.320 is kind of a later mythologization we don't have any evidence that he wrote these other works any actual

00:11:47.060 strong evidence so it was put together over 500 years as a process by students by students of students

00:11:56.320 and there's a lot of what academics like to say i really don't like this word a lot of distanciation

00:12:04.820 going on there that in other words none of his students you know wrote until later in their lives when

00:12:12.900 they were teachers and then it was their students and their students and it was is almost like a

00:12:18.600 little at first a little cabal of confucians who then built through their own followers something

00:12:26.360 in a text that changed and was adapted we're learning this from archaeology all the way for about 500 years

00:12:34.000 until around the beginning of our era of the common era and then we have the text in the order that we

00:12:44.860 see it today and is this i mean the reason why this sort of the way it was put together is this why

00:12:51.640 sometimes when you read the analytics i've read the analogs a few times and sometimes like this sounds

00:12:55.220 kind of cryptic some yeah as you said sometimes contradictory is it because of the way it was compiled

00:13:00.460 together or was was there something else going on there no that's definitely part of it and we've

00:13:05.780 learned this in other words we're living through a spectacularly interesting time right now in terms of

00:13:11.980 archaeology because what's coming from the ground it's not just axles you know and spearheads and all

00:13:19.900 those kinds of things what's coming from the ground is texts and we're finding out but for example in 200

00:13:26.440 bce there's a text of the analogs and it's completely organized in a different fashion some of the

00:13:33.880 what we would call in english words are different and so so we now know we for for 2 000 years people

00:13:41.500 didn't know this but we now know that the text took a long time to come together into the form we have

00:13:48.500 ironically enough that hasn't made it more kind of what what a westerner might say rationally

00:13:55.880 organized and so a friend of mine long story that i start the lecture series with is a colleague at

00:14:02.760 a conference said that it's almost like 500 sayings and that's that's about right it's about 500

00:14:09.920 statements in the analogs it's as though they dropped from the sky and then were just hurriedly

00:14:17.800 shoved into 20 chapters and so it looks incredibly haphazard and i'm not trying to make

00:14:25.800 an argument that too common in the west that you just kind of force a unity onto it to to make it

00:14:34.220 you know a strongly unified argument as though that it just has to be that way i do argue in a very

00:14:43.860 different way that there is a set of unified messages but that we have to change the way we look

00:14:51.280 at it and i quote my great professor at a greek specialist by the way who translated herodotus

00:14:58.160 the great historian named david green g-r-e-n-e david green at the university of chicago would always

00:15:06.240 tell us that you can't read shakespeare you should not read shakespeare without always always envisioning

00:15:14.760 the stage to the extent that you're reading words and you're checking sources and all of those kinds

00:15:21.000 of things you are you are losing that key connection he's right about shakespeare i would argue as well

00:15:28.700 but for confucius all of a sudden later on years later it hit me that professor green was right and

00:15:37.360 that it's the same with confucius by trying to read it like we read heidegger or aristotle what we're

00:15:45.080 failing what we have to understand is how and we all we all know this the how the pace of how a classroom

00:15:52.780 works and so if you start on book one and you start reading and you imagine the give and take of a gifted

00:16:00.700 teacher and a class over the course of a long very rigorous semester what you start to see is a topic

00:16:09.280 comes up and it's debated from one perspective and then you move on to other things and then the topic

00:16:17.940 if it's really important comes up again and then you see another perspective where he's dealing with another

00:16:25.020 student maybe someone who's a little headstrong and then he the message seems to be a little bit different

00:16:30.620 and then you go on and on and on and over the course of 16 weeks or perhaps it's a year-long course

00:16:37.900 or a much longer one maybe it's it's just all the courses you take over your life is that what happens

00:16:45.140 is that you start to develop deeper thinking about many topics because you have as we might say hit the

00:16:54.000 knowledge muscle in all kinds of different directions that's the analytics and that is the

00:17:00.500 way to appreciate it and not to be frustrated by this by this this this seeming skipping around

00:17:07.800 okay so when you're reading it imagine you're in a classroom imagine you're in a classroom with a

00:17:13.160 gifted teacher and and students who are quite varying um some who are timid some who are headstrong in

00:17:22.440 other words just like any classroom you've ever been in and all of a sudden it starts to make more

00:17:30.880 sense when certain topics come up and and one of them then compassion a consummate conduct and

00:17:38.800 compassion comes up very often that you start to see it in all kinds of different ways it's confusing

00:17:44.940 it's like a good discussion class it seems confusing at first and then it finally comes together

00:17:52.560 okay so you said earlier the whole point of the analects and what confusion was trying to do is

00:17:57.320 trying to show people how to live a good life which could eventually lead to individuals knowing how to

00:18:03.560 lead well if that was what part of their life no no he explicitly in his case that is exactly the point and

00:18:09.680 i would characterize it slightly differently as getting good at life getting good at life um you

00:18:16.560 know the good life it does have at least echoes of the greeks and and he he's not against that i

00:18:23.020 wouldn't i wouldn't argue that but but it's getting good at life okay so the analytics is about getting

00:18:28.840 good at life in a social context and the big part of that is living with consummate conduct and

00:18:34.380 confucius talks about this but he talks about it but it's a hard thing to define

00:18:38.880 so first off why is it so hard to define and then what would be a good working definition for us

00:18:45.720 for consummate conduct the idea is that this has been very difficult to translate and legitimately so

00:18:53.300 number one because it's such a straightforward simple character it appears so often it's the core

00:18:58.800 the the real core activity character that you find in the and i say character meaning chinese word

00:19:06.080 okay but word in the dialects and the idea is that it's about being good so one translation benevolence

00:19:15.360 okay that's not wrong the problem with translating is you have to pick a word or at least a small cluster

00:19:24.900 of words for a chinese character that has a semantic field that is voluminous that encompasses

00:19:34.740 three four five six seven eight english words this is one reason i read shakespeare so much because

00:19:41.760 as a translator it's just like i need more words um you know i want to at least envision the range the

00:19:48.640 field around one of these chinese characters and so benevolence is one that's been used humanity

00:19:56.380 another good one it's not wrong you know be a consummate person we say in english that's that's the best one

00:20:04.080 i think so far but be be a benevolent person be a humanistic person well that's tricky there's one translator

00:20:12.240 in the 1930s who who translated it as man being at his best so be man being at his best okay that gets a

00:20:22.380 little clumsy in english if i could translate it in the following way this is how i would do it i would

00:20:30.480 call it social moral ethical virtuosity and the most important words there are social and virtuosity

00:20:42.080 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

00:20:49.580 person right now but we all know people like this who are so good they flow through life and and they

00:20:57.660 influence others there's a there's a power to their goodness and and it's not just about you know being

00:21:05.180 good and behaving it's about influencing others having the capacity to transform a family through one's

00:21:13.540 social actions the capacity to transform one's company or even the broader electorate you know on that

00:21:22.620 is that is ren that is consummate conduct this has been translated in all kinds of ways this translation that i think

00:21:30.340 very highly of translates it as authoritative conduct that's a good translation the problem is americans

00:21:37.840 read it as authoritarian conduct even though that's not what's being said it what's being said is the

00:21:44.780 capacity to be good and to to convey that in one's actions to the point where others are transformed

00:21:53.720 you know the whole idea of transformative goodness which isn't isn't a bad translation now that i say

00:22:03.140 that i might write that down okay so just to clarify so a yeah an exemplary person is someone who has or

00:22:10.560 like a gentleman it's often translated like that yeah is someone who lives with consummate conduct

00:22:15.220 yeah okay yeah someone who lives and and that means complete and there are all kinds of other things

00:22:23.320 that are embedded in that being trustworthy being being um you know exerting your effort in

00:22:30.500 loyalty that's not the perfect translation but but all but there's there's all kinds of other

00:22:36.680 concepts that appear through the analogs that are kind of under the umbrella of consummate conduct this is

00:22:43.460 this is the king of the concepts gotcha and and i like i want to reiterate that point about when you have

00:22:50.320 consummate contact you have social virtuosity and as as i was listening to that part it reminded me i mean

00:22:56.600 i keep doing this because i'm most familiar with him is it reminds me of aristotle and his idea of

00:23:00.940 i guess prudence you know like a a virtuous person knows what the right thing is to do at the right time

00:23:08.440 for the right reason in the right state it's it's very situational is is confucius the same way it's

00:23:14.220 like his ethics is often very socially situational exactly the situational nature of it is often

00:23:21.300 ironically given aristotle's you know approach but is is often what trips up western readers because he

00:23:29.580 is targeting lessons and so it's very much i mean how one acts at any particular time you can't create

00:23:38.860 just a rule for it so there's a french social thinker that i'm inclined to teach very often

00:23:45.140 and his name is pierre bourgeois lived from 1930 to 2006 and one of the things he describes is what he

00:23:54.520 calls situational mastery or a feel for the game and and this is the french word you you know where where

00:24:04.080 game isn't a competition as much as it's a it's a situation that requires strategy and he describes

00:24:13.360 that human beings spend a lot of time creating rules but they're not really rules we find ways

00:24:20.440 around them and to deal with them in different ways and anyone who's a teacher who's set attendance

00:24:25.860 policies knows this but everyone knows it on some level you know a parent a parent rules for teenagers

00:24:32.500 okay and so so the idea is how do you deal how do you influence in different situations in different

00:24:39.240 changing situations and with the analects this is the power of the classroom teaching rather than

00:24:44.520 one big strong definition of this is what consummate conduct is rather you work through it to the point

00:24:53.020 where you get to many you see it in many different situations so one of the classic entries in the

00:24:59.380 analects is where one student says how should i behave and he said you should i paraphrase of course

00:25:06.060 you should go for it and then the next student comes in and says the same question asks the same question

00:25:13.780 what should i do you should defer to your brothers and your father you know and then the third person comes in

00:25:21.500 and says two people just asked you the same question and you answered them differently

00:25:26.760 and he said so and so is headstrong and i needed to hold him back a little bit

00:25:34.320 okay think as a parent think as a teacher of the idea of whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa before you commit

00:25:42.580 you know two eight years for a phd or something okay take it take a take a breath someone else is

00:25:50.540 really timid go for it go for it he is tailoring the messages and if we're if we're reading and trying

00:25:59.140 to force an integrated message onto the text we will fail to see that we should be learning from those

00:26:06.520 different situations and so so i mean it's maddening that there's no definition but if you patiently

00:26:13.460 work through the text then start over and work back through the text all of a sudden this dynamic

00:26:18.740 of different situations different personalities and different again social relational kind of

00:26:28.080 i'll go back to the very fine word you're using situations appear and it's almost like again

00:26:36.320 one thing i say in the lectures is is it's almost like reading a 2500 year old set of advice columns

00:26:43.360 and paying attention to the questions and the answers we're gonna take a quick break for a word

00:26:49.420 from our sponsors and now back to the show so part of becoming this is simply a person this gentleman

00:26:58.180 that lives with constant conduct one of the things that confucius talks a lot about is you have to

00:27:03.060 develop a love of learning yeah so what exactly are you supposed to love like what is what's this

00:27:09.280 what's the object of study for a confucian gentleman for confucius it was books i i'm not i'm not going to

00:27:17.880 deny that and no book was more important than the book of songs the classic of poetry is another

00:27:24.580 translation that's been used and the like a collection of poems that people have argued over the years

00:27:31.080 are about all of these lessons it's an extraordinarily important text that i i do teach in my teaching as

00:27:40.400 well so so in other words it's not an argument for for that just just learn from life and don't read

00:27:48.620 i would say the most important thing is that you you have to be all in so in one of the lectures and

00:27:57.460 this one's on youtube and at least a couple of the commenters uh did not understand why i did this

00:28:03.640 but i refer to a sociologist named c right mills who in his sociological imagination a classic work

00:28:12.940 from 1957 and still read today and for good reason is he argues that to be a technician you have to read

00:28:22.040 the books and do what the book says and we both know we all know that we need technicians in the

00:28:29.320 world if i'm getting an mri i want a skilled technician but he said no there's another level

00:28:36.020 which is imagination you have to be all in you have to not check out at the end of the day you have to

00:28:42.320 be thinking all the time and you need to be like seeing one thing in a book and then another in life

00:28:50.020 and putting them together that's part of the creativity of becoming an exemplary person what

00:28:56.920 sometimes translated as you said as gentlemen because you put it together from books and life

00:29:03.560 and there's a great story that sums this all up a person i've studied my whole life named sima guang

00:29:09.720 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

00:29:21.220 studying in his study reading the great texts of by that time 1500 years after confucius the great works

00:29:29.020 of confucianism and he was studying away while all the other kids played in the courtyard all of a sudden

00:29:36.300 there are cries from the courtyard a little child was drowning having played hide and seek and crawled

00:29:43.740 into a big urn that happened to have had rain water in it and he was drowning and all the children who

00:29:50.460 had more experience in the real world so-called were at a loss of what to do as their as their friend

00:29:57.060 was drowning little suma put down his book ran out grabbed a rock broke the vase and saved the child

00:30:06.040 this story has been told for a thousand years it's on postage stamps it's on um any you ask anyone in

00:30:13.600 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 0.59

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

00:51:19.920 resources and we delve deeper into this topic

00:51:21.760 well that wraps up another edition of the a1 podcast make sure to check out our art of manless

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The Art of Manliness - October 06, 2021

The Confucian Gentleman

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