“Wolf Larsen was unconscious, but it was a matter of minutes for the fresh air to restore him. We were working over him, however, when he signed for paper and pencil. ‘Pray do not interrupt me,’ he wrote. ‘I am smiling.’ ‘I am still a bit of the ferment, you see,’ he wrote a little […]
“And ever I loved Maud with increasing love. She was so many-sided, so many-mooded––’protean-mooded’ I called her. But I called her this, and other and dearer things, in my thoughts only. Though the declaration of my love urged and trembled on my tongue a thousand times, I knew that it was no time for such […]
“In our contemporary era, perhaps the most profound insight Confucianism has to offer the world today lies in prompting us to rethink the role of family as the ground and primary site of the consummate life and by extension, of a truly robust democracy. Ironically, we might argue that at the same time, inopportune intimacy […]
“In the Chinese cosmology expressed in the Zhongyong, the lived world is the bottomless unfolding of an always-provisional world order according to the rhythm of its own internal creative processes without any fixed pattern or guiding hand. And in the absence of any creator ‘God,’ this Confucian cosmology lifts the bar rather significantly with respect […]
“This Confucian conception of person makes no appeal to superordinate, substantive categories such as ‘soul,’ ‘self,’ ‘will,’ ‘faculties,’ ‘nature,’ ‘mind,’ ‘character,’ and so on, but instead locates person gerundively as the embodied, social activity of thinking and feeling within the manifold of relations that constitutes family, community , and the natural environment. ‘Person’ thus understood […]
“First, in our interactions, we must not look askance at each other (ni). We must get beyond viewing each other obliquely and with distrust. In the mutual shaping that occurs through both patterns of deference and the modeling that such patterns entail, we require the utmost focus and concentration and the fullest application of all […]
“The integrative nature of the moral experience means that a socially responsive ‘sense of shame’ (chi) is of high value in Confucian culture. As we have seen, shame is such a powerful expression of moral awareness that, when properly nurtured, can become a pervasive value that enables the community to be both inclusive and self-regulating […]
“[John] Dewey invests enormously in the centrality of language and other modes of communicative discourse (including signs, symbols, gestures, and social institutions) in explaining how the community grows its persons: Through speech a person dramatically identifies himself with potential acts and deeds; he plays many roles, not in successive stage of life but in a […]
“The Confucian claim that ‘everyone can become a sage’ is often read essentialistically as an assertion that the sage is some universally given potential in human nature that if actualized provides a person with those extraordinary talents through which to shape the world in some incomparable way. Some interpreters in searching for democratic elements in […]
“Within the web of Confucian relations, intimate friendships take on a transformative force that can only be adequately explained by understanding them as an extension and amplification of the family itself. As a dimension of a Confucian family-centered ethic, friendship serves as a definite, sometimes compensatory source of meaning and value. While immediate family relations […]