Search Results (2)

The main focus of this article is the explanatory power that music has in Confucianism according to the Analects (Lunyu 論語) and The Classic of Rites (Liji 禮記), which is reaffirmed in the Song Dynasty by Zhou Dunyi in the chapters on music in Tongshu (通書, The Penetrating Book). The article suggests that Tongshu’s chapters on music demonstrate the non-linear and non-metaphysical musical nature of Confucianism. According to this suggestion, the chapters introduce a dynamic, living model for the Confucian Way, on its own terms. This musical model supports the early Confucian vision of a multifaceted person, progressing in a multi-dimensional Way within a multi-layered polysemic world. Progressing along the Way, self-cultivation appears as one’s task to develop the various musical potentialities inherent in her or himself. The article opens with the epistemological idea of “musical knowledge” acquired by attuned hearing that winds up in a creative, peacemaking heart. Next, it introduces the ontological idea of a government that models cosmic harmony, depicting the leader as having an orchestral conductor’s aptitude; last, it presents a pragmatic perspective on the idea of musical education through the rules of propriety, depicting the practitioner as a skillful music player. Full article

In the 11th century in China, there was an unusual moment in which a number of philosophers, later associated with the Daoxue—or Neo-Confucian—school, confronted what they perceived as a long-standing sense of disjunction between inner, subjective reality and the structured patterns of the cosmos. One way they sought to overcome this disjunction was by positing new theories of the cosmos that focused on the underlying, shared reality behind the myriad differentiations of phenomena. A potential tension was born that affected how thinkers understood the relationship between wen 文 (writing, literature, culture) and Dao 道 (the cosmic process, the ultimate reality, the normative path). Some thinkers, like Zhou Dunyi 周敦頤 (1017–1073), believed that wen was simply a vehicle for carrying the Dao, and was thus, implicitly, dispensable. This idea was met with resistance from one of the leading intellectual figures of the time—the philosopher, poet and statesman Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101). While some of Su’s contemporaries, in their attempts to demonstrate that the world was real, and that truth was knowable, downplayed the role of individual experience and perception, Su stressed the necessity of subjective, individual experience as giving access, and concrete expression, to Dao. Su’s philosophical project came in the form of defending the enterprise of wen—writing as a creative, individual endeavor—and asserting that the quest for unity with the Dao could only be realized through direct, personal engagement in wen and other forms of meaningful practice. Through his philosophy of wen, Su sought to show that the search for truth, meaning and order did not—and could not—be achieved by transcending subjective experience. Instead, it had to be carried out at the point of encounter between self and the world, in the realm of practice. Full article