Words&Dirt

“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 classical Confucianism have latched on to this claim as a ground for an ostensive egalitarianism.  We have seen that Tang’s processual and provisional understanding of ‘human nature’ precludes the possibility of such a familiar, default interpretation.  Indeed, for him this same claim that ‘everyone can become a sage’ is an assertion that the spontaneous emergence of real significance in the ordinary business of the day is itself the meaning and content of sagely virtuosity.  Those ordinary persons who in their own lives achieve real significance in so doing are sages.  And given our initial conditions and our cultural resources, all of us have the opportunity to live such significant lives.  The potential for sagehood lies not within individuals exclusive of their worlds, but through a process of transformation that includes their worlds in the fullest sense.  When sages do appear, they have emerged pari passu from their radically situated, collaborative, and transactional careers as human becomings.”

––Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary, by Roger T. Ames, pg. 134

“When you are in your twenties, even if you’re confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.  Later…later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories.  Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety.  Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.  It’s a bit like the black box aeroplanes carry to record what happens in a crash.  If nothing goes wrong, the tape erases itself.  So if you do crash, it’s obvious why you did; if you don’t, then the log of your journey is much less clear.

Or, to put it another way.  Someone once said that his favourite times in history were when things were collapsing, because that meant something new was being born.  Does this make any sense if we apply it to our individual lives?  To die when something new is being born––even if that something new is our very own self?  Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood.  So does life.  Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

––The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes, pg. 114-5