Whose Tradition? Which Dao? SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture ————— Roger T. Ames, editor Whose Tradition? Which Dao? Confucius and Wittgenstein on Moral Learning and Reflection JAMES F. PETERMAN Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2015 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production, Eileen Nizer Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Peterman, James F. Whose tradition? Which Dao? : Confucius and Wittgenstein on moral learning and reflection / James F. Peterman. pages cm. — (SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-5419-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4384-5421-4 (ebook) 1. Ethics. 2. Confucius. 3. Confucius. Lun yu. 4. Confucian ethics. 5. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951. I. Title. BJ1012.P438 2015 170.92'2—dc23 2014002776 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To All of My Teachers 曰.三人行, 必有我師焉. 擇其善者而從之. 其不善者而改之. The Master said, “If there are several people walking on the road, surely there will be my guiding exemplars among them. I would choose [from among] them whoever is adept [at complying with the Way] and then follow them. In addition, I would choose whoever is not adept [at com- plying with the Way] and use their [examples] to rectify my conduct.” —Analects 7.22 Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xv 1 Introduction: A Prologue to an Unlikely Project 1 2 Confucius, Wittgenstein, and the Problem of Moral Disagreement 39 3 Confucius, History, and the Problem of Meaning 69 4 Wittgenstein and the Problem of Understanding at a Distance 95 5 How to Be a Confucian Pragmatist without Losing the Truth 121 6 Saving Confucius from the Confucians 167 7 The Dilemmas of Contemporary Confucianism 185 8 Fingarette on Handshaking 219 9 Acknowledging the Given: Our Complicated Form of Ritual Life 251 Afterword: The Way Backward or Forward: Wittgenstein or Confucius? 271 Notes 275 Bibliography 307 Index 315 Preface This book offers the first full-length comparative study of the ethics of ancient Chinese ethicist Confucius and the moral aspects of the later therapeutic approach to philosophy of twentieth-century philosopher Lud- wig Wittgenstein. The title, Whose Tradition? Which Dao?: Confucius and Wittgenstein on Moral Learning and Reflection, which alludes to Alasdair MacIntyre’s book, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1989), takes seriously a key claim of MacIntyre’s: Any sustainable version of moral inquiry must not be committed to basic claims and principles that make that inquiry impossible. To offer an example from MacIntyre’s playbook: If liberalism claims that all moral traditions make arbitrary assumptions about moral truth and it turns out that liberalism is itself a moral tradition, then lib- eralism makes claims that undermine its very possibility. I will refer to this requirement as the requirement that moral traditions and their related versions of moral inquiry may not be self-undermining. This principle of evaluation of traditions, or what MacIntyre calls “versions” of moral inquiry, can be traced back to the Socratic requirement that ethical judgments be accounted for in a way that is coherent with the rest of the person’s consid- ered judgments. This book seeks to defend an interpretation of Confucius’s project, depicted in the centrally important early Confucian text, Analects, as operating in what Wittgenstein scholar Cora Diamond, taking a phrase from Wittgenstein, refers to as the “realistic spirit.” The “realistic spirit,” as distinct from the philosophical realist, seeks, as she puts it, to clarify “our life” with concepts, including ethical life, in all its complexity, suspicious of the simplification and nonsense bound up with traditional metaphysics. Although the Socratic requirement that versions of moral inquiry not be self-undermining is a basic principle for evaluation of competing versions of moral inquiry, MacIntyre’s use of it to challenge the Confucian moral tradition is unsuccessful. Although I explicitly take up MacIntyre’s challenge to Confucianism in Chapter 7, the whole project of the book can be seen ix