Saturday December 20, 2008 6:20 am Lethbridge

Chap. 4 Confucius's Balanced Order

• Here are the main section sub-headings:
  • The Aristotle of East Asia
  • Order versus Entropy
  • Confucius and the I Ching (The Book of Changes)
  • Confucian Virtues
  • Yin and Yang: "Connected but Different"
  • Deference to Yin
  • Extreme Duties versus Extreme Rights
  • The Confucian Legacy
  • From C to Geometry

The Aristotle of East Asia

• "It is Tao above and beneath all, as revealed to Confucius in The Book of Changes, that permeated his thought and informed his system of virtue ethics." [p. 106]
  
  
• "Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching (The Way and Its Power) is a metaphoric and poetic treatment of The Way, whereas Confucius's Analects are literal and practical applications of The Way to everyday life." [p. 106]

  Tao Te Ching is one of my favorite books, although it has been a few years since I last looked at it.

• Both Lao Tzu and Confucius speak of the "The Way", yet they often seem to contradict each other. For example, Confucius encourages a commitment to lifelong learning ... Then again, Lao Tzu counsels us to 'do away with learning' in order to understand the deeper meaning of Tao." [p. 107]
  
  
• "Confucius's message is that we are born to learn, rather than remain in a state of ignorance, while Lao Tzu's message is that language and thinking can mislead us, and have their limits in any case. Surely you have had experiences that words cannot express?" [p. 107]
  
  
• "Whether you know a lot or a little, the most important thing is what you do with what you know, in terms of practicing virtue." [p. 107]
  
  
• "Lao Tzu's point is that you must learn to think for yourself." [p. 107]
  
  
• "Paradoxically perhaps, a good way to stimulate thinking for yourself is to acquire some 'food for thought' from great minds, which brings us back to Confucius." [p. 107]

Order versus Entropy

• "As he [Confucius] said in the Analects, 'To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order [p. 109 - 110]
  
  
• "The basic goal of every human being is to fulfill the duties and responsibilities demanded by his or her place in the familial, communal, and political order ... Then individual happiness will follow." [p. 111]

Confucius and the I Ching (The Book of Changes)

• "In fact, there is no such thing as chance, only an inability on our part to explain more sully how and why certain processes appear to us as random." [p. 112]

  This reminds me of one of my sayings: Ignorance is normally distributed.

• "The key insight of Tao is that these contrasting pairs do not stand in a relation of opposition and mutual exclusion but rather of complementariness and mutual inclusion. In other words, every complementary pair comprises a greater whole, and each complement also contains something of the other." [p. 112]
  
  
• "Yin and yang are primordial complements, emanating from Tao. In theory, everything has a complement, except for Tao itself. It is vital to appreciate the distinction between polar opposites and Taoist complements. Again, polarity means opposition and mutual exclusion of pairs - ... truth versus falsity in Aristotelian logic ... Polarity is a Western concept ... By contrast, complementarity means completeness and mutual inclusion of pairs." [p. 112 - 113]

Confucian Virtues

• "But as Confucian philosophy recognized early on, what civilized man really needs to survive is not his isolation from others, but rather his immersion with them." [p. 118]
  
  
• "Two cardinal virtues that Confucius espoused ... are ren and li.
  • Ren means benevolence, beneficence, goodness, love: an unselfish love of humanity. ...
  • Li means propriety, or appropriate conduct." [p. 118]
    
    
• "There are five basic kinds of human relationships, and all are governed by li:
  • parent and child,
  • husband and wife,
  • friend and friend,
  • old and young,
  • ruler and subject. [p. 118 - 119]
    
    
• "The West's ethical focus in on the individual; East Asia's, on the social organism." [p. 119]
  
  
• "If we seek fundamental explanations for the West's historically outstanding indivisual achievements, and East Asia's historically enduring social cohesiveness, we find them in these different conceptions of virtue." [p. 119]

Tags: philosophy, religion