Words&Dirt

“Restated in the cosmological language of focus and field, Mencius is saying that, when properly nurtured and cultivated, his ‘flood-like qi‘ achieves the greatest ‘extensive’ (most vast) and ‘intensive’ (most firm) magnitudes in his relations with his environs.  This language of extensive field and intensive focus suggests that when one nourishes one’s qi most successfully, one achieves the greatest degree of meaningful resolution (yi) within the most extensive field of qi (dao).  In this manner, sustained excellence in one’s conduct (daode) is attained through acquiring the greatest degree of potency and effectiveness (de) in relation to the most far-ranging elements of one’s environments (dao).  In fact, this is the explicit message of Mencius:

Everything is here in me.  There is no joy greater than, on introspection, to find that one is truly sincere (cheng).  And there is nothing more immediate in striving to be consummatory in one’s conduct (ren) than making every effort to put oneself in the other’s place (shu).

The character cheng in this passage is conventionally translated as ‘sincerity’ or ‘integrity.’  In most occurrences in the classical corpus it does carry this meaning, and this Mencius passage is no exception.  But in a processive and transactional world, sincerity is the bond that unites one in one’s relations with others, and that makes the process of personal co-creativity possible.  Under such circumstances, ‘integrity’ is not simply retaining what you ‘have’ or being who you ‘are’: It is what you ‘do’ and ‘become’ in integrating effectively with family and community.  Cheng is thus the ground of an integrative and creative process of becoming consummately human.  It is not ‘being whole,’ but the process of ‘becoming whole’ within the multilateral relations that constitute one’s natural, social, and cultural environments.  This inseparability of integration and creativity is reinforced explicitly in this Mencius passage by appeal to ren, the correlative, consummatory notion of ‘person’ in which the realizations of oneself and other persons are mutually entailing.  The Analects defines the project of becoming ren in precisely these terms:

Consummatory persons (ren) establish others in seeking to establish themselves and promote others in seeking to get there themselves.  Correlating one’s conduct with those close at hand can be said to be the method of becoming consummate in one’s conduct (ren).

When understood in light of this pervasive notion of qi, the phenomenal world is not only a site of process and becoming, but also has the existential possibility of deployed artistry in correlating relations and contextualizing things productively.  In such a world, the human experience is a field both focused by and bringing into focus the myriad items and events comprising.  Indeed, in addition to its extensive field of qi, the Mencius passage places equal emphasis upon the intensive ‘me’––this particular focus––as an active participant in the quality and meaning of the emerging world.  There is no external vantage point outside of the ceaseless flow of qi.  The vital world is necessarily entertained from one particular vantage point or another, and hence this insistently particular field of qi is always construed perspectivally––from a continuing ‘here’ or from a continuing ‘there,’ from a persistent ‘me’ or from a persistent ‘you.’  Further, each particular perspective is holographic in the sense that it contains within its own compass the extensive field of relations that contextualizes it––a field of relations that is made more or less meaningful by its own intensity of focus, its own resolution.  As such, a meaningful life achieved amplifies the meaning of the cosmos.”

––Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary, by Roger T. Ames, pg. 67-8

“Dom Cristão winked.  ‘You know too many of our secrets.  If we help you find answers to your questions, will you go away?’

‘There’s hope.  The longest I’ve stayed anywhere since I began serving as a speaker was the year and a half I lived in Reykjavik, on Trondheim.’

‘I wish you’d promise us a similar brevity here. I ask, not for myself, but for the peace of mind of those who wear much heavier robes than mine.’

Ender gave the only sincere answer that might help set the Bishop’s mind at ease.  ‘I promise that if I ever find a place to settle down, I’ll shed my title of speaker and become a productive citizen.’

‘In a place like this, that would include conversion to Catholicism.’

‘San Angelo made me promise years ago that if I ever got religion, it would be his.’

‘Somehow that does not sound like a sincere protestation of faith.’

‘That’s because I haven’t any.’

––Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card, pg. 161-2