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:
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.
- Friday 17 December 21
