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1. Who am I, and how should I act in the world?
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1.2 Confucius on Notions of the Self

MICHAEL PUETT: So let us now turn to Confucius's definition of rituals, a,
as we will see, very counterintuitive vision.
And to do so, let me begin with a rare moment in our lives,
where we tend to do what Confucius is talking about,
at an extremely mundane level.
And then use that to draw out his philosophy.
So let me begin with a rare example, where Confucius
would say we're doing something good.
I'm sitting at a dinner table with my nephew.
I won't give you his real name.
Let's call him Sammy.
So little Sammy is sitting across from me at the dinner table.
And Sammy does what little children will often do.
He looks at me and says, give me the salt, Michael!
Now, we would all do some equivalent of what I'm about to mention.
I, of course, would then look at Sammy and say, Yes, Sammy.
But what do you say?
And he kind of rolls his eyes because he's
had to go through this so many times.
And goes, just give me the salt, Michael.
And I say, yes, Sammy, but what do you say?
And I keep doing it until poor Sammy finally has to say,
Please give me the salt, Michael.
Now, he's using a tone of voice, a roll of eyes,
to make it clear he thinks this is ridiculous.
I do it anyway.
And then what do I do?
I give him the salt. And I say, now what do you say?
And we go through the same rigmarole until poor Sammy finally
has to say, Thank you for giving me the salt, Michael.
And then I say, you're welcome.
Now, Confucius would actually agree with what we're doing.
And let's, now using Confucius's way of speaking,
analyze what has just happened.
What has happened from a Confucian point of view
is I have created a ritual space in which I
am helping to break Sammy from his habitual ways of acting in the world.
And I am helping him train himself to become a better person.
In this ritual space that I have de facto created,
it is as if Sammy and I are equal people.
And Sammy is asking something of his equal.
Now, I say "as if" because note that's not at all true.
And he knows it's not true.
And I know it's not true.
Sammy has no choice but to play the please and thank you game.
He knows perfectly well I am hierarchically in a superior position.
I'm not his parents.
But I'm his uncle.
It's certainly sufficient enough.
He has no choice but to play it if he wants to get the salt.
I could even-- if I were mean, I would scold him, or send him to his room
without his dinner, if I wanted to be an evil, punishing uncle.
And he knows I could conceivably do that.
Well, he knows I wouldn't do that.
But he knows I could conceivably do something like that.
We're not equal.
But in this ritual space, we are.
And I am training him how to ask something
of another human being, an equal human being,
and how to express gratitude when something is given to him.
Note, also, that if Sammy learns the ritual so well that he simply
internalizes saying please and thank you all the time,
he has not learned the ritual.
Note, as he grows up, if he continues to all the time say please and thank
you, please and thank you every time he wants something,
and every time he expresses gratitude, he will be failing.
He will not be sensing the situation.
He will not be sensing how to ask something of another human being,
how to express gratitude, because usually please and think you
are going to be either way too formal for most situations, way too less
of a way of phrasing true gratitude because oftentimes your friends will
do things much more dramatic than a mere thank you could conceivably express.
So if Sammy learns the ritual, and, if I'm
a good uncle, will continue to work with him as he grows up,
he goes from that initial being sort of forced in this ritual situation, to say
please and thank you, rolling his eyes, gradually
he learns to do it without rolling his eyes.
Gradually, he learns to do it, smiling, please, thank you.
Gradually, he then begins to learn in different situations,
different tones of voice that would be more
appropriate to express these emotions.
He begins to have different emotions because he begins
to sense people around him better.
He begins to sense what it means to ask something of this person, what it means
to express gratitude, which it turns out for different people
in different situations will be very different.
He slowly gains a sense of the different ways tones of voices
affect people differently because they have different ruts and patterns too,
just like we do.
And he learns to sense those and sense when
to be more calm, when to be a little more laughing, when
to be more smiling, when to be a little more grave.
In other words, if he's learning the ritual, what he's doing--
being forced to do at a young age, and then doing as he grows up--
is he is learning in this ritual space to train his dispositions,
train his ability to see the world, train his ability
to interact with those around him.
And again, he can only do it, from this perspective, in that ritual space.
It requires him to enter that ritual space.
In this case, the dining room table, that I sort of create as a ritual space
by making these requests of him.
And in that ritual space, he's not the normal Sammy that he was before.
The normal Sammy was-- he's still a child.
A wonderful child, but grabbing things, wants things,
not sensing people around him.
I'm training him in that "as if" space to learn how to do this.
Confucius would say, that's the ritual.
A ritual, in other words, are not habits that we're
forced to do over and over again.
For Confucius, that's the danger.
The danger is we become these habitual creatures,
who just do the same thing over and over again, so much that they
become a part of us.
Rituals force us for a brief moment to be a different person,
in the space where we are acting differently, interacting with those
around us differently, and learning in that ritual space
how to break our normal modes of being.
For Confucius, a ritual, in other words, is not a habit.
It's what breaks us from our habits and begins the possibility for us
to become good.
Now, if that's a rare example, where we do something Confucius would appreciate
and agree with, next I would like to take you through one of his examples
from his own day.
And use that to describe in more detail what he really
means by this "as if" world and what the implications for us as human beings
would be if we truly learned to take ritual seriously.
Thank you.

1. Who am I, and how should I act in the world?
/
1.2 Confucius on Notions of the Self

MICHAEL PUETT: So let us now turn to Confucius:
Confucius's view of the self, Confucius's view
of how we could live a good life.
To do this, let me introduce you to some very characteristic ways of talking
about the self in early China, ways that contradict, to put it mildly,
many of our most fundamental assumptions.
So to begin with, do we have some pre-given true self in here some place
that we need to look within and find?
No.
Here's what we are at birth.
We're a mess.
We're a mess of different energies, faculties, stuff.
And we're all equally messy creatures, just a mess of stuff.
And what we become as a human being therefore
depends on how we live our life.
But before that, kind of what we happen to do and situations we
happen to be in.
So to give some common examples at the time.
So imagine at a very young age, this mess encounters other messes.
So a baby encounters parents and friends.
What happens?
The baby, a young child let's say at this point, is happy or sad.
In this way of thinking, if someone smiles at a baby or a young child,
the young child is happy.
In this way of thinking, that smile, that act
drags out from the child a feeling, an energy of happiness,
and hence they feel happy.
Someone yells at the child.
That act brings out, drags out an energy of anger.
And hence, as we would say, they feel anger.
In other words, we are completely passive in the world,
simply becoming emotionally things based upon simply who we happen to encounter.
Totally passive.
And then it gets worse.
Because also from a very young age, let's move a couple of years later now,
not only do we continue to simply be pulled emotionally
by immediate things we encounter, very early on, too,
we start falling into patterns of interaction.
So to stick with those examples, someone does something that for whatever
reason reminds me of that person before who smiled at me.
It equally drags out the energy of happiness.
Someone else does something that emotionally reminds me
of the person who yelled at me.
Even if the person had no sense of anger at me, it still drags out from me
that energy of anger.
In other words, at least in my might earliest examples,
I'm really responding to actual things out there, someone smiling, someone
being angry.
From a very early age, however, we cease to even respond to actual things.
We start responding by rote, by pattern.
I'm happy, I'm sad, I'm angry, I'm infuriated,
I'm occasionally even joyous, based very little on what's actually happening.
I'm simply responding to the world by rote.
And the argument is this, again, not only sets in early,
it can set in to such a complete degree, it
becomes fundamental for how we experience the world,
how we interact with people, the kind of person we become.
Indeed, when we today use phrases like, I'm
going to look within and find my true self,
from this other way of thinking, what I'm looking in and finding
is probably just a bunch of ruts and patterns
that I have fallen into from an incredibly young age.
When I say things like, oh, I am the sort of person who is,
like if a good quality, you know, I like to think big.
I'm also the sort of person who gets angry at little things, a bad quality,
both of which, of course, I should learn to love and embrace
because they're just me.
Well, from this way of thinking, I'm saying a bunch of habits and patterns
that I have fallen into, in which I do become exactly the things I just
mentioned, I'm going to define those as me.
I'm going to define them as my true self.
And I am going to learn to love and embrace them.
In other words, love and embrace a bunch of ruts and patterns
I fell into from an incredibly young age.
That's what we're saying.
And then it gets worse.
Because no, we then also say, once you've
looked within and found this true self that we think is this true self,
live your life accordingly.
Define your career, your relationships, a future marriage
partner based upon ruts and habits you fell into from a young age?
That's what we're saying?
Now, suppose they're onto something.
Suppose this is right, and if you pause for a second,
I think it's not difficult to see that maybe they are.
Begin thinking back on this life that I was describing before as,
here's my true self that I found.
Think actually about you, or more likely your friends, because oftentimes it's
difficult to see this in oneself.
Look at how many times your friends just kind of repeat
the same relationships over and over, regardless of who they're dating.
How many friends just do the same things over and over?
And then imagine, what if our whole lives are like this?
Now, if this is the case, needless to say from this point of view
the last thing you want to do is love and embrace
a bunch of ruts and patterns.
If this is the case, what you want to do is break these ruts and patterns.
What you would want to do is break all of this stuff that we have become.
Let me now give you a quote from Confucius.
One of his great statements is, "To become good, you must overcome"--
a better translation might even be conquer, "the self,"
the self being this just ton of ruts and patterns we've fallen into,
"by submitting yourself to ritual."
Now, this to our modern ear strikes us as absurd, if not downright
horrifying, right?
We tend to think of rituals as things that tell us what to do.
And if we're these people with free will choosing for ourselves,
the last thing we should do is follow rituals.
But note first of all, if this description of the self
is onto something, this self we think we have is not us.
It's a bunch of patterns and ruts.
And then from this point of view, you must submit yourself
to something that will break it, because you're not
going to choose it on your own.
And for Confucius, this is ritual.
Now, let's lay out some of the implications
before we turn in detail to his vision of ritual.
To begin with, note, we've done now an exercise
looking at habits that we tend to have.
And as I mentioned, we tend to think of these as surface phenomena, right?
I choose self-consciously what habits are good or bad
according to what would be best for me.
From this point of view, most of what we are
doing when we make a list of our habits are precisely the things
that we see and therefore could consciously choose.
What if we have habits that are these ruts and patterns that are so
embedded in who we are that we don't notice them,
because again, we think they're just us, and we're loving and embracing them.
If he's right, we don't even know what our habits are.
Or rather, we misascribe them to being who we really are.
This is why Confucius will say, you must submit yourself to ritual.
This, of course, raises the key question.
What in the world does he mean by ritual?
And as we will see, here too, it's a very counterintuitive vision
of ritual, one that pushes against our own assumptions of what
a ritual would be.
And that will be the key topic that we will turn to next.
Thank you.

1. Who am I, and how should I act in the world?
/
1.1 Introduction to Confucius' Notions of the Self

MICHAEL PUETT: Now we also believe there are things called habits.
And habits we tend to think of as kind of surface things.
So based on who I am, I want to find habits that best work with me.
So to stick with myself as an example, I'm someone who loves to read books.
It's part of who I am in this terminology.
These led to habits, some of which aren't perhaps so good.
I buy books-- a lot of books, way too many books.
And so a typical way I might think is--
OK, my true self is that I love to read.
I have a habit of buying too many books.
I should learn to either buy fewer books or purchase a Kindle so that I
can download more electronic books so I won't be killing as many forests
and filling up as many bookshelves in my apartment.
So I have a true self.
I rationally decide if my habits coming out of that true self are good or not.
And I rationally change my habits so that again my true self
can be fulfilled but not in a way that would be harmful
to, in this case, the forests of the world, et cetera.
So I have a true self.
I with my free will decide what's best for it.
And habits are the surface things
I just want to be sure are good habits that allow me to be true to myself
and not harmful.
This is pretty typical of the way we think.
It's pretty typical of the way we give advice.
Certainly, when we're talking to children, as they grow up,
this is the wording we will often use.
So what if we're wrong?
What if we not only wrong, what if these assumptions
about the self and the type of a lifestyle they
lead to are dangerously wrong?
What if they even lead us to live our lives
in ways that are refining, limited, restrictive, that prevent us
from living up to the our potentials,
in fact, restrict what we could possibly be as a human being
and dramatically restrict our ability to interact with those around us.
This is exactly what Confucius, our first early philosopher
in the tradition-- in fact, the figure who really open up the sets of debates
that will launch the Chinese philosophical tradition
would say if he heard all that I just mentioned.
He would say not simply that they're wrong, but they're dangerous.
What we will turn to next is Confucius's vision of the self,
very counter-intuitive.
His vision of what we should, therefore, do with our lives,
how we should rethink things like habits, rethink the self,
rethink indeed our entire life trajectory.
These ideas, as we will see, will be very counter-intuitive,
extremely challenging.
And what I ask you at this stage is take them seriously.
You don't have to agree with them immediately.
I doubt you will agree with them immediately, but take them seriously
in the sense of: assume that maybe they're onto something.
And if they are, work through the implications.
And then together, we will talk about what
it would mean to follow the kind of a vision
that Confucius is leading, as opposed to ones we take for granted.
Great, thank you.

1. Who am I, and how should I act in the world?
/
1.1 Introduction to Confucius' Notions of the Self

MICHAEL PUETT: Hello.
My name is Michael Puett.
And today we will begin our discussion of classical Chinese philosophy, one
of the truly great philosophical traditions in world history.
Our goal in these sessions will be to take you
through the great philosophers in the tradition.
And particularly to look at how, when we really take these ideas seriously,
they will challenge some of our most fundamental assumptions.
And today, we begin with the self.
What are our assumptions about the self?
What would, in this case, Confucius say about the self?
And how would it lead us to fundamentally rethink our notions,
our assumptions?
And how, even more importantly, would it lead
us to live a very, very different life if we are convinced?
And I suspect, at least in part, we might be convinced.
Now, to begin this discussion, let me start out
with some characteristic assumptions we tend to make about the self, words,
phrases, thoughts we tend to have.
So let me just lay out a few of those.
So oftentimes, especially when we're thinking
about how to be a good person, how to lead a fulfilled life,
we'll use phrases like the following.
Well, the key is to look within.
Look within and find oneself.
So if I'm speaking of myself, I would often say,
I just need to look within, find myself, find my true self,
find who I really am.
And often, we'll think about this in terms of a life arc.
So oftentimes, we'll say to children, particularly maybe high school age,
moving into college, look within.
Find yourself.
Once you've found yourself, then learn to love yourself
and embrace yourself for who you are.
Learn to love your great qualities and love your bad qualities, too,
because that's just you.
And you should love yourself for who you are.
And then we will say, now moving into college often,
once you've successfully found this true self that you love and embrace,
then you want to start thinking how rationally
to lead your life in ways that will allow this true self to be fulfilled.
So what career options best fit who I really am?
And we will even start giving students-- in fact,
even beginning in high school now--
personality tests, that will help them find out who they are,
what careers will fit who they are, what careers would not fit who they are,
and therefore what careers they should avoid.
And then they will hopefully spend their college years
picking a major that fits who that will be.
And that will propel them into a career that will best accord with themselves,
their true selves.
And same things with our personal life, right.
So given who you are, you want to find a partner who matches who you are.
And here, too, personality tests and now dating apps
will actually help you match who you are with who you would best fit with.
If you're type XYZ, would you best fit with type GHQ?
And it will match you up with who is best for you.
And then, we like to think, as long as I live my life being true to myself,
loving myself, rationally deciding according to what's best for me,
this true self, how I fit best in the world,
we will lead a happy and fulfilled life.