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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Confucius

The Confucian obligations of a manager

10 Sunday Sep 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Family, Foundations of Ethics, Leadership, Morality, Philosophy of Language, Politics, Work

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Confucius, obligation, Project Management Institute

I recently passed the examination to be a project management professional. In the Standard for Project Management – the Project Management Institute‘s statement of principles underlying project manaagement – one particular principle caught my eye for its ethical significance. That is the principle they call stewardship.

The closest thing to a definition of stewardship in the Standard is:

Stewardship has slightly different meanings and applications in different contexts. One aspect of stewardship involves being entrusted with the care of something. Another aspect focuses on the responsible planning, use, and management of resources. Yet another aspect means upholding values and ethics. (25)

That definition covers a lot of ground, but the part that struck me in particular was being entrusted with the care of something. That idea resonated with an ethical principle that I’ve found important as a manager – one which I have drawn above all from Confucianism.

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Beyond the Turing test

04 Sunday Jun 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in Compassion, Consciousness, Emotion, Foundations of Ethics, Friends, Honesty, Human Nature, Metaphysics, Morality, Psychology

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Alan Turing, Blake Lemoine, Boston University, ChatGPT, conferences, Confucius, David Chalmers, Frans de Waal, Google, nonhuman animals, obligation, pedagogy, phenomenology, Replika, technology

Artificial intelligence is all the rage right now, and for good reason. When ChatGPT first made the news this December, I tested it by feeding it the kind of prompt I might give for a short comparison essay assignment in my Indian philosophy class. I looked at the result, and I thought: “this is a B-. Maybe a B.” It certainly wasn’t a good paper, it was mediocre – but no more mediocre than the passing papers submitted by lower-performing students at élite universities. So at Boston University my colleagues and I held a sold-out conference to think about how assignments and their marking will need to change in an era where students have access to such tools.

As people spoke at the conference, my mind drifted to larger questions beyond pedagogy. One professor in the audience noted she’d used ChatGPT herself enough that when it was down for a couple days she typed in “ChatGPT, I missed you”, and it had a ready response (“I don’t have emotions, but thank you.”) In response a presenter noted a different AI tool called Replika, which simulates a romantic partner – and looks to be quite popular. Replika’s site bills itself as “the AI companion who cares”, and “the first AI with empathy”. All this indicates to me that while larger philosophical questions about AI have been asked for a long time, in the 2020s they are no longer hypothetical.

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Confucius in middle age

29 Sunday Jan 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Flourishing, Practice, Virtue

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Confucius

There is a famous passage from Confucius that goes like this:

The Master said, “At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning. At thirty, I stood firm. At forty, I had no doubts. At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven. At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth. At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.”

This is section 2.4 of the Analects, Confucius’s selected sayings. The translation is an old one from James Legge, which is freely available online. I’m not claiming that Legge is a particularly good translation, but it’s adequate for my purposes today, because the details of the translation aren’t what I’m interested in.

Instead the point I want to make today is just this: this passage can be a real inspiration in middle age.

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Let us not define ourselves by biological categories

25 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Confucianism, Family, Foundations of Ethics, French Tradition, Human Nature, Politics, Self

≈ 1 Comment

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Confucius, existentialism, expressive individualism, gender, identity, Mencius, postmodernism, Prince Ea, race, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Smith

In my mind, one of the most important implications of qualitative individualism is that we human beings should not be defined by bodily or biological categories. I think that point has done a great deal to underlie various liberation movements of the past century. I think it is perhaps most visible in Simone de Beauvoir, who detached gender roles from biological sex and warned us against an “essentialism” that tied sex and gender so closely together. The increased acceptance of people being transgender, I think, is the next step in a process that began with Beauvoir: my biological genitalia do not define my gender identity. I view the struggle for racial equality in the light of this ideal as well, as Prince Ea does: skin colour or related phenotypical characteristics should not define who we really are. Continue reading →

How the Grinch found eudaimonism

27 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Christianity, Confucianism, Flourishing, Friends, Human Nature, Judaism, Pleasure, Rites, Virtue, Zest

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Christmas, Confucius, Dr. Seuss, law, Mohandas K. Gandhi, television

Last week my wife and I re-watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas! – the original Chuck Jones cartoon, not the later remakes. As we talked about it, I realized that that Christmas special, and the original book, are a great depiction of eudaimonism – perhaps even in a Confucian form.

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On civic virtue and unwritten constitutions

13 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Human Nature, Morality, Politics, Virtue

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Brad Raffensperger, Confucius, Donald Trump, Frans de Waal, Han Feizi, James Doull, law, nonhuman animals, Thomas Hobbes, Tim Wu, United States, Xunzi

One of the more pressing questions in political philosophy is how to prevent the arbitrary use of power. I think Thomas Hobbes and Xunzi were sadly right to diagnose an abiding darkness in human nature: left to our own devices, human beings can easily degenerate into disastrous crimes. Primatology suggests a confirmation: among our closest (or nearly closest) living relatives, the chimpanzees, a jockeying for power and status can lead to vicious rivalries and even murder – even in the idyllic situation where all their material needs are provided for. The evidence of existing human history does nothing to suggest that language or other human capacities have made us better than that.

But Hobbes, as far as I can tell, offers the worst possible solution to this problem: to concentrate power in a single sovereign person. Then that one person becomes able to tyrannize everyone else in a way completely unrestrained, just as he pleases. (It is rarely a she.) The twentieth century gives us too many chilling examples of mass murder and terror from a sovereign given arbitrary power.

A more reasonable approach to the problem asks how we can contain the dark impulses of all people – and of the sovereign leader most of all. It is likely no mystery why I’m asking this question living in 2020 in the United States.

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Asian historicism before Protestantism

18 Sunday Aug 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Early and Theravāda, Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Modernized Buddhism, Protestantism, Reading and Recitation

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Bryan Van Norden, Confucius, Dai Zhen, Dīpavaṃsa, Heinz Bechert, Justin Tiwald, Mahāvaṃsa, Mencius, Randall Collins, Sri Lanka, Steven Collins

We are surely familiar with the pattern by now: members of an Asian tradition are concerned about supposed corruptions in their tradition which depart from the intentions of the tradition’s historic founders, so they turn with renewed focus to the historical texts that they take to be at the tradition’s centre. We, with our historical hindsight, now know that this Asian concern with texts and founders is an alien importation, the work of colonial subjects aping their Protestant missionary rulers’ search for textual historicity.

Except for one thing: it isn’t.

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Is it morally wrong to eat your dead dog?

05 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Death, Disgust, Family, Food, Monasticism, Morality, Sex, Virtue

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Confucius, J. David Velleman, Jonathan Haidt, nonhuman animals, Peter Singer, virtue ethics

Jonathan Haidt opens his The Righteous Mind with two hypothetical examples, “thought experiments” as analytic philosophers would say:

A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.

And

A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.

Haidt asks us: Did the people in either of these cases do something morally wrong? My reaction was, and is, to say yes in the first case but not the second. Continue reading →

My Buddhist practices

21 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Hermeneutics, Karma, Karmic Redirection, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Prayer, Reading and Recitation, Unconscious Mind

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

academia, autobiography, Confucius, Dalai Lama XIV, Mañjuśrī, Pema Chödrön, S.N. Goenka, Śāntideva, Tibet

Buddhist practice of various sorts has helped me greatly in trying to deal with the frustrations of cancer care. I wrote already of the role of prayer to Mañjuśrī and Buddhist reading. Now I’d like to say more about what I learned from that reading – and how these practices all fit together. Continue reading →

The practice of reading

07 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Health, Hermeneutics, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Reading and Recitation, Self, Serenity, Therapy

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

academia, autobiography, Confucius, Paul J. Griffiths, religion, Śāntideva, Zhu Xi

Calling myself a Buddhist, it turns out, was only the beginning. Buddhism was there for me in this dark time, not only as a way of focusing prayer, and certainly not merely as the resource for a hypothetical chaplain. The Buddhist ideas that taught me so much before were still there and a great comfort. And there was more still: I have now begun to practise Buddhism as I see it, on a far deeper level than I ever had before. Continue reading →

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