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President Donald Trump & Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)

Assuming, as I think we should, that Trump egregiously displays all of the standard symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) or, simply, pathological narcissism, we should begin to direct more attention, anger, disgust, impatience, and the available means of persuasion toward members of Congress who, by their silence and inaction (with very few exceptions to this generalization), are now absolutely complicit and thus individually and collectively responsible for his behavior in office, including the myriad harmful consequences that directly and indirectly follow therefrom. It is not likely that Trump will experience, without therapeutic intervention, spontaneous remission of his mental illness, which means he will continue to exhibit a conspicuous inability to distinguish facts and reality from wishful thinking and illusions (perhaps occasional delusions as well), which means he will continue to lack a disposition to truth, indeed, he will continue to shamelessly lie (and lack any sense of guilt for same) in both private and public fora, and the office of the Presidency and the actions of the President will continue to be, first and foremost as well as in the last instance, in his mind, all about who he is, how he is perceived, what he thinks and believes, how everything in the social and political world redounds in the first place to the effects on his self-esteem and esteem. Perhaps this explains why Trump seems to particularly relish meeting with monarchs and those of royal background generally, in addition to displaying a feckless fondness for authoritarian leaders. Encounters with those holding executive power in democratic regimes, however, he finds deeply discomforting.

Trump’s tenure is quite troubling and (potentially if not already) extremely dangerous to our individual and collective welfare and well-being, as well as to the welfare and well-being of countless people all over our planet. Trump should voluntary leave office or be impeached, plain and simple: any alternative at this point makes a mockery of even the pretense to minimally legitimate democratic governance, which itself is considerably more than that which flows, for better and (and more often for) worse, from the pinnacle of power in our government enshrined in the office of the Presidency.

Further Reading:

• Alford, Ryan. Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of the Rule of Law. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017.
• Fromm, Erich (Barbara Weinberger, tr. and Wolfgang Bonss, ed.) The Working Class in Weimar Germany: A Psychological and Sociological Study (Harvard University Press, 1984; German edition, 1980; the study itself and Fromm’s analysis and conclusions date back to the 1930s, and the Frankfurt Institute, largely in the person of Max Horkheimer, and for reasons not well understood yet probably far from compelling ones, declined to publish the study).
• Kernberg, Otto F. Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. Rowman & Littlefield, 2004 (1975).
• Kernberg, Otto F. Severe Personality Disorders: Psychotherapeutic Strategies. Yale University Press, 1984.
• Moore, Burness E. and Bernard D. Fine, eds. Psychoanalysis: The Major Concepts. Yale University Press, 1995.
• Morris, Alex. “Why Trump Is Not Mentally Fit to Be President,” Rolling Stone, April 5, 2017.
• Pettigrew, Thomas F. “Social Psychological Perspectives on Trump Supporters,” Journal of Social and Political Psychology, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2017): 107-116.
• Wills, Garry. Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State. Penguin Press, 2010.

Sadder but ... Wiser

 

In Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Jon Elster notes two psychological assumptions we routinely hold: “that depressed people tend to believe that things are worse than they in fact are and that those in more exuberant moods tend to believe they are better.” Elster believes the second clause after the conjunction is valid, while the former clause “is probably wrong,” a conclusion based largely on “striking psychological findings over the past fifteen years:”

“[T]he only persons who are capable of taking an unbiased view of the world are the depressed. They are ‘sadder but wiser,” a research finding we can classify as “depressive realism” theory. While Elster characterizes the aforementioned experimental findings as “far from final,” he understandably sees them as robust, according them presumptive truth. Elster highlights some typical findings within this theory:

“In experiments designed to test subjects’ understanding of their control in situations with imperfect correlation between their responses and an observable outcome, non-depressives exhibit an ‘illusion of no control’ when the outcome is associated with failure. Furthermore, depressed subjects accurately assess their chances in dice-rolling experiments, whereas the non-depressed tend to overestimate their chances. Depressed subjects tend to be more evenhanded in the causal attribution of credit and blame, whereas non-depressives typically attribute negative events to other and positive events to their own intervention. Non-depressive subjects see themselves more positively than they do others with the same objective characteristics, whereas the depressed are not subject to this self-serving bias, nor to the opposite, self-deprecating bias. Depressed subjects have an accurate idea of how other people perceive them, whereas non-depressives exaggerate the good impression they make on others.”

Elster cautions us about attempting to derive any moral psychological imperatives from these research findings if only because “the depressed are not very motivated to do anything. The reason there is no sand in their machinery of action is that the engine is idling.” The rest of us have to “get on with the business of living,” in which case we accept that there will be “sand in the machinery,” which may or may not be the fault of the emotions, and thus it behooves us to accept that we act with something considerably less than an aspiration to “full cognitive rationality” (this does not mean we necessarily act in an irrational manner), thereby avoiding  “the cost of lacking anything we want to be rational about.”

Jealousy & Envy

                                                                                                                                                              Is there a difference between “jealousy” and “envy?” It seems we often use these terms interchangeably but some have thought or argued that they’re not quite the same. When we discussed the parable of the “prodigal son” in my class, I asked the students if the “older brother” was feeling jealousy or envy (or possibly both?!), or if the distinction was at all meaningful. Most students believed these terms were different words for the same emotion. I was inclined to argue otherwise. In any case, and apropos of the material I’m reading, consider La Rochefoucauld: “Jealousy is in some measure just and reasonable (raisonnable), since it merely aims at keeping something that belongs to us or we think belongs to us, whereas envy is a frenzy (fureur) that cannot bear anything that belongs to others.” 

Aaron Ben-Ze’ev says the meaning of these two terms overlap and that “some languages do not even have separate names for these emotions.” Following Ben-Ze’ev, emotions

“toward the fortune of others constitute a common group whose prevalence is related to the importance we attach to the comparison with other in assessing our own value and happiness. This group is divided according to others’ good or bad fortune. The major items in the group of negative emotions toward the good fortunes of others are envy and jealousy; the major emotions in the parallel group directed at the bad fortune of others are pity and compassion.” [….]

Here is a brief introduction to these two emotions from Ben-Ze’ev’s chapter on same which is quite helpful toward distinguishing between jealousy and envy, while conceding some of their common features:

“Envy involves a negative evaluation of our undeserved inferiority, whereas jealousy involves a negative evaluation of the possibility of losing something—typically, a favouable human relationship to someone else. Envy and jealousy would seem to address a similar emotional attitude. Both are concerned with a change in what one has: either the wish to obtain or the fear of loss. The wish in envy is for something one does not have, while in jealousy it is something one fears losing. This distinction is not negligible: the wish to obtain something is notably different from the wish not to lose it. Another difference is that jealousy is typically associated with exclusive relationships. Envy has no such restrictions. The focus of concern in envy is our undeserved inferiority. Because inferiority can stem from a variety of factors, envy may be born of any or all of them and not merely from the threatened loss of some human relationships.”

Please see: Aaron Ben Ze’ev, The Subtlety of Emotions (MIT Press, 2000): 327-352. Another useful but far briefer treatment of these two emotions is found in Robert C. Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2003): 256-265. The best analysis of the “parable of the prodigal son” (and all of the parables and principal saying of Jesus for that matter) is Ann Wierzbicka’s What Did Jesus Mean? (Oxford University Press, 2001): 300-309, although she does not focus on our two emotions as they apply to the older brother in the parable.  

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                

Catholic Bishops Oppose Republican Tax Proposal

In case you missed it (I did), the American Catholic bishops earlier this month issued a wise document opposing the Republican tax plan. The commentary is from Thomas Reese, former editor of America: http://religionnews.com/2017/11/03/churches-are-usually-reluctant-to-push-tax-reform-but-catholic-bishops-are-trying/

A Thanksgiving Reflection

Sometime back I asked my now retired doctor how he coped with the fact that despite best efforts, he lost many patients to death. He said, "I am grateful for every day."

Religious Freedom, Equality, Third Party Harm, and Civil Resistance

I was a moderator for a panel celebrating Nelson Tebbe’s sweeping and carefully argued new book, Religious Freedom in an Egalitarian Age. The panel members were Douglas NeJaime, Micah Swartzman, Reva Siegel, and, of course, Nelson. There were many interesting issues provoked, but I was especially interested in the extent to which religious liberty claims can survive when their accommodation would harm third parties. In a co-authored Yale Law Journal article, Reva and Doug take the position that dignitary harms should prevail over religious liberty claims even if no material harm is caused. So a photographer who religiously objects to providing services for a same-sex wedding would lose because of the infliction of dignitary harm on a lesbian couple even if many other photographers were willing to provide services.

At the panel, Doug provided a thick description of the nature of dignitary harm, and certainly the unfairness of being denied services on the basis of whom you love with its accompanying embarrassment, humiliation, anger, and stigma is serious and substantial. At the same time, one should at least pause to recognize that a tragic choice is presented in this context. It is also a serious matter when the state forces persons to violate their conscience (whether or not religiously based) by compelling them to take actions that violate deep beliefs. Freedom of conscience rightly has a long pedigree in our history and violating that conscience is also a serious and substantial matter. Moreover, the photographer, if she adheres to her beliefs would not be able to stay in business.

For their part, Micah and Nelson basically argue that religious freedom claims causing third party harms that are more than negligible need not be accommodated. In his book, Nelson claims that this is in fact the law. One of several counterexamples Nelson discusses in the book is the provision that exempted, for example, the Quakers from killing people in wars. The result, of course, is that someone else had to do it, and that is a serious material harm. Michael Dorf asked whether it would make a difference if the person could be identified who was drafted in the Quaker’s place. In the discussion that followed, Micah took the position that the conscientious objector provision imposed a serious moral harm on others and should not have been adopted. Words escape me (except to note that the exemption honors the peace lovers who warn us against war, that the failure to accommodate is unduly harsh, and that abandoning the exemption too easily dispenses with a long history of respecting religious freedom). I jumped ship when I was told that instead of balancing the degree of harm imposed against the seriousness of violating conscience, and considering the alternative possibilities, and whether the law enforcement model would prove productive, we would stop the analysis when more than negligible harm was produced.

Reva concluded this with an interesting suggestion. Thinking aloud, she wondered whether those who refused to fight in wars on religious grounds might be subject to insubstantial penalties compared to those who just violate the law.

I would keep the exemption, but I think the point has a lot of merit in the context of civil resistance. I have in mind a serious of demonstrations in Syracuse at a military base where military personnel manually directed the firing of drones into Afghanistan and Pakistan. Scores of protestors in a series of demonstrations were arrested for trespass, disorderly conduct, and, just to show that prosecutors know how to overreach, obstruction of governmental administration. The judge thought heavy sentences were appropriate because these were acts of civil disobedience and Martin Luther King had willingly gone to jail. My argument was that these acts were acts of civil resistance and that they were public regarding. Heavy sentences should be reserved for serious violations through self-regarding conduct. If I am not mistaken, Bill Quigley has argued that acts of civil resistance causing only negligible third party harm should be considered a defense because of the public education associated with the conduct.  I think Bill is right.

The Left: Secular, Spiritual, Utopian & Pragmatic

 

I was quite moved upon reading the following passage yesterday from Vincent Geoghegan’s persuasive and profound book, Utopianism and Marxism (Methuen, 1987):

“In moments of despair [Rosa] Luxemburg was driven to conceive of happiness in terms of a rejection of politics:

‘I cursed the damn “politics” that stopped me from answering father’s and mother’s letters for weeks on end. I never had time for them because of those world-shaking problems…. And my hate turned against you because you chained me to the accursed politics…. Yesterday I was almost ready to give up, once and for all, the goddamn politics (or rather the bloody parody of our ‘political’ life) and let the whole world go to hell. Politics is inane Baal worship, driving people—victims of their obsession, of mental rabies—to sacrifice their entire existence.’

Part of this is clearly the inevitable degree of hardship and sweat associated with any conceivable form of political activity—but it is also testimony to the deep psychic wounds inflicted on many militants by the constrained, positivist politics of the Second International.”

Luxemburg’s agonizing thoughts on her political experience will resonate with many activists on the Left whose personal lives have often experienced considerable turmoil or neglect as a result of their devotion, as we say, to the cause. Indeed, it is such “accursed politics” or politics as “inane Baal worship” that Gandhi hoped to transform with his creative and arduous attempt to introduce the “āśrama” ideal into political life, in his case, as a form of karma yoga, of a piece with the larger endeavor to “spiritualize politics.” Identical or analogous attempts to overcome the tensions, contradictions, and divides between the values and identities cherished in everyday life and political work are found, for example, among “engaged” Buddhists, Deep Ecology Greens, the praxis of Liberation Theology, as well as the prefigurative politics and integrative education found in the history of anarchism. It also a “central theme” animating a book by one of the founders of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), the sociologist Richard (‘Dick’) Flacks, who today remains active in local politics. Flacks devotes a considerable portion of Making History: The Radical Tradition in American Life (1988) to exploring the “disjunction experienced between making history and making one’s own life.”

Over at the U.S. Intellectual History Blog* there is a Roundtable on Leilah Danielson’s American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of American Radicalism in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) that provides us with a peak into the life of an activist who seems to have more or less finessed and perhaps transcended the aforementioned “disjunction” in an exemplary manner, with provocative implications for activists on the Left. I’ll be writing more on this in the near future, inspired in part by a recent issue of the journal Rethinking Marxism. I hope to explain why and how the contemporary Left in this country should and can be a social movement at once secular, spiritual, (non-pejoratively speaking) utopian, and pragmatic as part of the global struggle for liberté, égalité, fraternité and our national variation on this struggle in the fight for racial justice, socialism, and a non-violent (anti-militarist) society.  

* The latest post in the seven-part series, part 5, is here.

The Right to Resist Oppression & Just Revolutionary War

To date, and rather surprisingly given the violent (and non-violent) struggles of oppressed peoples around our planet in the twentieth century, those who specialize in normative political theory and the ethics of war (or just war theory) have had precious little to say, at least in any systematic or theoretical sense, about what constitutes a “legitimate, armed, non-terrorist resistance to oppression” (in particular, when such oppression takes the form of violence by the state), in other words, “what are the moral rules or constraints and parameters of justifiable armed resistance and revolution?” Christopher J. Finlay’s book, Terrorism and the Right to Resist: A Theory of Just Revolutionary War (Cambridge University Press, 2015), addresses these questions by providing us, in the words of one reviewer, with “a lucid, persuasive and comprehensive extension of revisionary just war theory to cases of resistant violence.” The morality of revolutionary war is given a fair hearing and just defense. With regard to a possible warrant for terrorism, Finlay argues that “some such justification is conceivable.” 

“But at the same time, the conditions that would need to be present to warrant such a justification are such that it is very seldom likely to occur in reality. It is necessary to specify what those are, not only—or indeed, not primarily—in order to recognize justified terrorism if it should ever arise, but also to reinforce the assurance with which we may condemn its use in the vastly greater number of case where it is not justified.”

I have only skimmed through the book for now, and it appears to be first-rate. The fact that it references some of my favorite political philosophers (as well as others whose work I’m not nearly as familiar): Allen Buchanan, C.A. J. Coady, and Robert E. Goodin, for example, also inclines me to view it with favor.

Finally, I found the title—while provocative and thus market-savvy—misleading. It should rather be A Theory of Just Revolutionary War: The Right to Resist and Terrorism. The change would better reflect the extent and significance of the respective arguments, as the treatment of terrorism does not have pride of place in the book.

I have two bibliographies at my Academia and ResearchGate pages directly relevant to Finlay’s argument: “Violent Conflict & the Laws of War,” and “Terrorism.”

Mueller's Backup Plan

Many are worried that pardons by Trump or the firing of the Special Prosecutor would trigger a constitutional crisis. This is understandable. The notion that a suspected criminal could pardon people who might implicate him or stop the investigation is clearly at war with the rule of law. The rule of law calls for an impartial investigation. It does not call for a suspected criminal to pardon people or stop investigations for illicit reasons. Even assuming that the Courts would uphold such actions and assuming that the spineless Republicans would continue to cater to the deplorables in their base by looking the other way, Robert Mueller has a backup plan that will mitigate the damage.

Perhaps you noticed that Paul Manafort was not charged with all the felonies implicated in the indictment. Tax evasion is one of the most conspicuous omissions. If the factual claims of the indictment are accurate, Manafort engaged in a massive scheme of tax fraud. Why is that charge not included along with others? A Professor of Law at Fordham, Jed Shugerman, explains that this is a brilliant move by Mueller, not an oversight. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/11/robert_mueller_s_brilliant_strategy_for_outmaneuvering_trump_pardons.html

It is well known that Mueller and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman have been working together. New York law does not permit state prosecutors to bring charges already pursued by federal prosecutors. So if Mueller is pardoned by Trump, some crimes will be off the table. But Eric Schneiderman will have plenty of charges left to file against Manafort, and the President cannot pardon anyone for state crimes.

When complicated and sleazy financial transactions are implicated, multiple felonies can be charged. Mueller will have the option to use this strategy against Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and many others if the evidence warrants. At the arraignment of Manafort, the prosecutor stated that the indictment was a small part of a much larger investigation. It is not clear to me if New York state election law prohibits the kind of conduct suspected here.  Leave aside the Trump Tower meeting and Trump’s false rendition of his son’s conduct, it is certainly fishy that so many people lied about contacts with the Russians (leaving us to believe they had something to hide) and it is also fishy that the Trump campaign and the Russians pressed similar themes. It would be unfortunate if state electoral laws do not reach such conduct.

It is clear, however, that state laws can reach financial crimes and Mueller has shown, he will leave room for that as protection if Trump takes more substantial steps to interfere with the investigation.

Wen and the Odes in Confucianism: possible lessons for a democratic polity?

In the political domain … acts of knowing and persuading rested upon wise use of the Odes.

… [I]n any social gathering, true virtuosi of the Odes, whether male or female, could safely express their innermost feelings without fear of offending others. (Early traditions attributed a number of odes to women.) [….] Regarded as the product of suitable emotions aroused in the singer, the odes served as a versatile rhetorical tool by which to arouse sympathetic emotions in audiences public or privileged, lettered or unlettered.

Just as the odes taught that skillful and rewarding relations depend on a proper appreciation of the objects deserving admiration, so the deeper pleasures available to humans—self-knowledge, friendship, sexual pleasure, and connoisseurship—relied on an extraordinary capacity to cultivate in oneself and others the desire for more refined social interplay. In the end, the ethical followers of Confucius claimed this province of ordinary human interaction, with its marvelous potential for imbuing men with greater vision, as their own special area of expertise, in contrast to those thinkers now labeled Legalists, Mohists, or Daoists. — Michael Nylan

Apologia—I don’t speak here to the question posed in the title (see the second list of titles below for works that address, in one way or another, this topic), but I was thinking of prominent politicians in existing democratic regimes as well as “leaders” of sundry kinds in contemporary society while reading about the role of the Odes among elites in ancient China. Suffice to say, our standards for knowledge and understanding, etiquette (as inextricably bound up with virtue), and moral charisma are far lower and perhaps ill-understood as well; at the very least, our expectations are rather different than those articulated in and inspired by Confucian models.

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I have been reading afresh about the function of the Odes in ancient and early imperial China among the elites (ruling and otherwise). The Odes (poems that were chanted) are one of the so-called Five “Confucian” Classics (the others: Documents, Rites, Changes, and Spring and Autumn Annals), although it so happens that these works pre-date Confucius. The Confucian appellation owes to their significance for Confucian pedagogy, as they were essential to the ruist tradition that is later synonymous with individual and collective Confucian identity. One’s knowledge and facility with the odes in both public and more intimate fora were signs of erudition and suasive power (or charisma), an effective display of social skills and intuitive discernment that, in turn, revealed abilities related to an understanding of moral and psychological character as well as the specific dynamics and exigencies of the situation at hand. The social graces evidenced in one’s mastery of the odes was said to resonate with the “sound of virtue,” thereby “influencing others for the good.” Michael Nylan elaborates:

“… [T]hose who could chant odes and respond appropriately to them were considered ‘qualified to become great officers,’ who would ‘turn their merits to account.’ Conversely the lack of such abilities was deemed sure proof of the person’s loutishness, ignorance, insensitivity and lack of suasive influence, in that ‘words lacking pattern and refinement do not go far [in persuading others].’ Based on his knowledge of odes, one could get a grasp of a man’s training, self-discipline, and resourcefulness. And this ability to know men via their knowledge of the Odes was considered the most valuable type of knowledge available to the ruling elite. To know others and be known favorably by them was the one skill essential to those wishing to acquire or retain high rank. At the same time, those already in power needed to exercise their powers of discernment in knowing others, lest they fail to measure merit accurately, employ it suitably, and reward it proportionately, for only thus can a superior attract good men to his service and secure their loyalty.”

The Odes, and the Five Classics in general were part of wen: originally, line or pattern; to inscribe, to embellish; the arts or culture; generally speaking, wen makes reference to the patterned regularity or symmetry, harmony and beauty found in 1. (the dao of) tian (‘Heaven’), 2. (the dao of) the natural world, and 3. (the dao of) a properly humane culture (i.e., one suffused with ren). With regard to tian and the natural world one might say that, in the scientific language of today, wen is evidenced in the physical laws (or normative regularities) of nature (cf. Anthony Zee’s Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics, 1999), or the mathematical and aesthetic elegance of the Golden Ratio—Phi—throughout human history (see Mario Livio’s The Golden Ratio, 2002). For Confucius, wen entailed the six arts,” namely, rites (li), music, archery, charioteering (the previous two being martial arts), mathematics and calligraphy. Of course given Confucius’ commitment to the Five Classics, we can assume poetry and dance were likewise essential. In Analects: 7.6, Confucius says, “Set your sights on the way (dao), sustain yourself with virtue (de), lean upon benevolence (ren), and sojourn in the arts (wen).”

Confucius’ position on the role of tradition in an appreciation of the arts is gleaned from 3.14, wherein he normatively discriminates between the respective dynasties: “The Chou [Zhou] dynasty looked back to the Hsia [Xia] and the Shang dynasties. Such a wealth of culture! I follow the Chou [Zhou],” In the Book of Rites (one of the Five Classics) we are reminded that “the perfection of virtue is primary, and the perfection of art follows afterward.” Put differently, the arts are enlisted in the Confucian perfectibilist or open-ended, hence lifelong project of moral and spiritual self-cultivation. They serve to integrally and holistically discipline or train the body and heart-mind (xin) of the would-be junzi (Confucian ‘gentleman,’ a meritocratic designation no longer tied to ‘nobility of blood’).

In thinking of the role of the Odes, we should keep in mind with Edward Slingerland the fact that “music was considered by the early Confucians to be one of the most powerful tools for shaping the emotions, and the metaphor of musical perfection also served for Confucius as a metaphor for the perfected state.” Xunzi understood wen as essential to harnessing or disciplining the “natural and irrepressible” emotions that “burst forth in words, poems, songs, and dances:”

“There is a danger, however, that this effusion of passion may overstep its proper bounds by violating the principles of the Way, and what began as a natural human tendency may metamorphose into a source of chaos. But the Sage Kings took steps to address just that problem: they established rituals of artistic expression, ensuring that poems and song conform to the Way. For when the people of a state sing and hear proper music, they are influenced by its power to bring themselves in line with the Way as well.”(Paul R. Goldin)

Confucius and his followers were well-known for reciting the three hundred odes, playing them on strings while singing and dancing. His devotion to the Odes exemplifies his understanding of wen. The Odes had variegated epistemic, political, ethical, aesthetic, psychological, and cultural functions in ancient China, only some of which we’ll mention here (see the excellent if not unsurpassed treatment provided by Michael Nylan in her 2001 study, The Five “Confucian” Classics). Not surprisingly, “all traditions portray the Odes’ vital importance as a cultural repository of eminent utility and as a teaching tool for the social graces” (Nylan). The Odes could arouse the emotions of others, allow for the acute perception of others’ feelings, enhance a fraternal sense of community, “diplomatically” express grievances or critiques so as not to offend or humiliate their targets, serve as a display of character and erudition. Formally or stylistically speaking,

“the inherent ambiguity and the multivalence of the odes allowed song-makers and audience alike to thrill to witty displays of learning, imparting a single meaning to lines quoted with a specific context. In effect, then, an ingenious, flexible, yet guided response, reaching ever higher levels of insight, became both the prerequisite for and the end product of Odes’ learning. (Nylan)

We might choose to characterize the Confucian project of self-cultivation itself in aesthetic, or more broadly, artistic terms, as Hall and Ames do in Thinking Through Confucius (1987) and Nylan does here:

“Moral self-cultivation is itself a kind of exquisite taste: the truly cultivated have learned to delight in the moral Way [Dao] and to appreciate the beauty and utility of ritual [li]. Such sophisticated powers of discrimination keep them on the path of full humanity (jen), painstakingly refining their initial impulses toward sympathetic understanding, like the jade cutter who cuts and files, chisels and polishes the precious material. People who know enough to take pleasure in the Way find that the end products of their efforts, their lives or their jades, have become exquisite works of art.” (Nylan)

Little noticed, at least from my vantage point, the Confucian conception of wen has much in common with the Platonic if not classical Greek understanding of the role of music and dance in paideia (moral education; aretē, or the moral habituation to virtue; education directed toward ‘the Beauty and the Good’): “As an instrument of paideia, ritual dancing, in which the customs of the group are encoded, implied the acquisition of moral virtues and a sense of civic responsibility, of mature allegiance to the community, an espousal of its traditions and virtues” (see Steven H. Lonsdale’s Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion, 1993). For Plato, music and dance were “the first and fundamental steps of education,” constituting a form of “unwritten laws” that complement or sustain the written laws of the polis. These unwritten laws might helpfully be identified as a subset of Confucian wen or simply li. Substitute the Confucian heart-mind (xin) for “soul” in the following and the identification is transparent: Plato believed music and dance contributed to moral education and civic virtue, in other words, to ends motivated by an intimate knowledge of the Good, “because rhythm and harmony penetrate most easily into the soul and influence it most strongly, bringing with it decorum and making those who are correctly trained well-behaved” (Lonsdale).

Music and dance in ancient Greece, like the composition and performance of the odes in classical China, “made moral learning at once the most natural and so most delightful of all human activities—far more than a polite accomplishment, a significant source of gratification or fulfillment [in Greek terms, eudaimonia].” (Nylan)

References & Further Reading

• Ames, Roger T. and Henry Rosemont, Jr., trans. (1998) The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine Books.
• Confucius (David Hinton, tr.) (1998) The Analects. Washington, DC: Counterpoint.
• Eno, Robert (1990) The Confucian Creation of Heaven: Philosophy and the Defense of Ritual Mastery. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• Fingarette, Herbert (1972) Confucius: The Secular as Sacred. New York: Harper Torchbooks.
• Goldin, Paul Rakita (1999) Rituals of the Way: The Philosophy of Xunzi. Chicago, IL: Open Court.
• Goldin, Paul Rakita (2011) Confucianism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Hall, David L. and Roger T. Ames (1987) Thinking Through Confucius. Albany, NY: State
• University of New York Press.
• Ivanhoe, Philip J. (2^nd ed., 2006) Confucian Moral Self-Cultivation. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
• Kline, T.C. and Justin Tiwald, eds. (2014) Ritual and Religion in the Xunzi. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• Nylan, Michael (2001) The Five “Confucian” Classics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Van Norden, Bryan W., ed. (2002) Confucius and the Analects: New Essays. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Xunzi (Eric L. Hutton, tr.) (2014) Xunzi: The Complete Text. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

The following titles speak to the actual and possible relevance of Confucian philosophy to contemporary politics, political philosophy, ethics, and moral psychology:

• Angle, Stephen C. Sagehood: The Contemporary Significance of Neo-Confucian Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 
• Angle, Stephen C. Contemporary Confucian Political Philosophy. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012.
• Bell, Daniel A. and Hahm Chaibong, eds. Confucianism for the Modern World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Chan, Joseph. Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.
• Chong, Kim-chong, Sor-hoon Tan, and C.L. Ten, eds. The Moral Circle and the Self: Chinese and Western Approaches. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2003.
• de Bary, Wm. Theodore and Tu Wei-ming, eds. Confucianism and Human Rights. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
• Ivanhoe, Philip J. Confucian Reflections: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times. New York: Routledge, 2013.
• Kim, Sungmoon. Confucian Democracy in East Asia: Theory and Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
• Kim, Sungmoon. Public Reason Confucianism: Democratic Perfectionism and Constitutionalism in East Asia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• Neville, Robert Cummings. Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000.
• Rosemont, Henry, Jr. Against Individualism: A Confucian Rethinking of the Foundations of Morality, Politics, Family, and Religion. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015.
• Shun, Kwong-loi and David B. Wong. Confucian Ethics: A Comparative Study of Self, Autonomy, and Community. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Tu Wei-ming. Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought. Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1979.
• Tu Wei-ming. Way, Learning, and Politics: Essays on the Confucian Intellectual. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993.

 A bibliography for Classical Chinese Worldviews is here.