A Lady of Ren

 

-- for Geneva & Seneca Crane (blogging while drinking plum wine)

A few days ago, Professor A. Ku asked a question that continues to fascinate me. Concerned with 4.3 of the analects

4.3: 唯仁者能好人，能惡人

“The Master said: It is only the one who is ren who can love and hate others.”

he asks, "why should anyone be required to hate (or to love)?" For the obvious reasons, I am not crazy about the translation and attempted to give my gloss:

For me, the word of interest is not 惡 but rather, 能– which is to say that what is being emphasized is that this “liking and disliking” is based on a certain capacity, which is itself made possible by self-cultivation. And for what it is worth, this is how I am reading 4:3

The Lady of Ren, does not 1) restrain all emotion; nor does she 2) not restrain all emotion; rather she seeks to form/transform (形）emotion through the cultivation of self (via among other things the practice of rites) in order to discern the true ren capability in others. The like and dislike is not about personal preferences (arbitrary blind love or unmerited dislike) but rather is born out of cultivation of self.

The Professor then repeats his original question:

So, still my question here is — even if we build into “hating and loving” (on the part of the Lady of Ren) this very portrait you describe — whether this “intuition” is merely a ground floor level “capacity” that is simply redirected towards certain targets (like a culvert), or whether that intuition is a kind of “emergent” property, a new capacity that only the Lady of Ren would have. If so, then it’s not necessarily just a ground-floor level emotion “redirected by li. It’s more than that.

OK, I have no idea what a culvert is, but I intuitively feel that the closest approximation to what this is like is our aesthetic sense. And I say:

This is perhaps not unlike aesthetic sensibility. If you don’t turn off the TV; if you don’t stop drinking your booze out of a brown paper bag– well, need I say more?

Like our aesthetic sensibility, some people are born with more than others, but most people have this capacity. And yet, if we do not cultivate our aesthetic sensibility, perhaps only in a genius would it cultivate itself.

My beloved tea teacher would always repeat that the practice of tea (this kind of embodied mindfulness) and the actual handling of beautiful objects had the affect of "polishing our hearts"-- "This makes us more virtuous," she would repeat. For her, an aesthetic sensibility 美感 was not necessarily equivalent to virtue 美徳 but one could lead to the other (and indeed that understanding can be seen right in the kanji itself　→美).

What do these two perhaps connected sensibilities share? Well, first of all, both require a kind of self-cultivation that is embodied. You cannot learn beauty nor virtue from books. It is impossible. It is sense know-how (embodied know-how) that is carried over into how you live your life (hence, "ritual comportment"). In addition, both types of sensibility, rather than universalize or categorically deginerate our emotions (love and hate) in the way of religion (Buddhism), instead seek to transform these emotions in a refined or edifying way (maybe this is what Professor Ku meant by a culvert??).

In what sense is this also cognitive? Well perhaps something along the lines of Merleau-Ponty's "anti-cognitive cogntive science" approach. Because we are talking about is-- in Sam Crane's words: a cultivated moral aesthetic sensibility.

And embodied practice is probably the only real means of improving or refining this sense. As Sam says:

And that is where Ritual comes in. Ritual is the conscious and well-intentioned enactment of all facets of Duty (the big duties and the little duties) at all times. It’s not like going to church on Sunday and then stealing hubcaps during the week. It is an all the time thing. The Ren person is always on, always working to perceive context and orchestrate proper response to context. It may get easier with age and reiteration (like Fingarette’s handshake!), but it always requires care and attention.

Human sensibility is probably something most humans are hard-wired for. But it demands exemplery examples and routine, doesn't it? And it is these exemplery examples (in the form of a teacher or art work) which are beautiful plus virtuous.

As is their enactment-- beautiful plus virtuous.

And again (for this is my main point this week): based firmly in human emotion, their aim-- rather than negating emotion or extinguishing desire-- rather is to refine them. And, perhaps no where is this linking of beauty and virtue more pronounced than in Japan-- don't you think? Is this not the hallmark of Japanese traditional arts and literature?

**

Anyway, I have been working on an editing job about the murals of Kizil. Part of the great "pearl necklace" of Buddhist murals that form a great arc across Asia, from Ajanta to unforgettable Alchi; up to Kizil, Bezeklik, Dunhuang-- straight across to the phenomenal murals at Horyuji in Nara; Kizil is said to have been perhaps one of the finest. I already wrote a bit about the lavish use of ultramarine that so stunned the German expedition team here, but thinking about the murals again today, I was imagining what it must have been like before the murals were cut out of the caves and shipped overseas. Pilgrims would have entered the cave from the blinding sunlight of the desert outside-- and much like pilgrims at the Borobudur, they would have moved along an "iconographic program": like any ritual, it would have been structured in such a way to aim at an inner transformation-- achieved bodily as one performed the ritual.

Emotions (émouvoir) as that which most moves us cultivated through physical movement (practice/pilgrammage). This is the task of the Lady of Ren. And you will notice that its opposite (Enlightenment) is characterized by non-movement, stillness and extinguishing. Anyway, it's interesting to think of it this way at least.

Comments

[Chris]

First, it is good to drink booze from a brown paper bag. Preferably on a street corner.

You know I think embodiment is the key point here -- there are such clear connections between Confucian thought and certain aspects of Existential thinking (not that there aren't clear divergences too).

But I wonder here. Why does the slow cultivation of emotion through ritual-oriented redirection actually change the way in which we feel or see the world?

Why wouldn't it merely be a kind of behaviorist-like structuring? I feel this way about X, I get "zapped" (punishment). If feel this way about Y, I get rewarded. Sooner or later, I feel the right way about the right things.

All very legalist, no?

But clearly Confucius thinks that there's more to it than this. It's not just about "redirection" via Li (or law). On some level, there has to be a transformation of thinking/feeling. Something different from mere "redirection" towards the right things.

What provides that extra component? Or is it simply "practice this li for long enough, and the transformation will just happen"? If so, it's hard to see why Confucians would be so "anti-legalist". I can change a person's behavior, and perhaps after a while I might even change their actual feelings and ways of seeing things. But that, I would think, for Confucius is not "ren".

So what's the mysterious component?

[Peony]

Hi Chris,

Bear with me, because I have not read anything recently in philosophy of mind-- I am stretching my brain to try and think back... but I feel that your question somehow is getting stuck in the muck of Descartes (body-mind duality) Is that possible? And is it possible that Merleau-Ponty might have someting to say??

for example in the practice of tea, what happens? You practice and as you practice over and over again the affects are experienced as what you and I might call embodied transformation; that is, the input comes via the senses and is enacted in such a way that it affects the way you carry out your activities out of the tea room. I have a friend named MW who works with art and he talks about how even when he is handling cheap crockery he still handles it like it was a Roman antiquity. I think his training/practice has affected a transformation in his behavior and also in his perceptions... this is how I imagine the rituals to work; in that sense that ritual practice becomes ritual comportment becomes ritual ontology. Kind of like pilgrammage (with no body/mind duality).

And the "distaste" is like aesthetic distaste. Like when I put on reality TV. It's not hate, but by my *turning away* from this in one sense I am
1) taking a stand based on my sensibility
2) doing so in hope of affecting change

Does that make sense..? And I still feel like I am drifting around your question (through my own ignorance)

You have persuaded me on "grasping;" I totally agree about existentialism... and am with you part-way on the booze in the brown bag.

[Sam]

Chris,
I think for a Mencian-Confucian, unlike a Xun Zi-Confucian, it is not really a behavioralist thing because we are shaping and cultivating our innate goodness. Allowing the "water" of our nature to naturally flow in toward the good. For those who assume a bad human nature it is more about restriction or repression. I don't want to get down on Xun Zi, because I think he still believes in perfectibility (unlike Han Fei Zi), but the Mencian view of self-cultivation is what Peony is getting at, I think.
As to brown paper bags: been there, done that. But it is, I believe, better to raise ourselves out of that squalor. These days I prefer Haut Medoc to Mad Dog 50/50 (that last reference might date me...). It's a Mencian thing...

[Chris]

Sam,

I think that's exactly right. In my most recent post on the "Culverts of Hate" thread, I said just as much actually. I suggested to Peony that one way to understand the difference in the two alternatives I was offering was to think of them as the Mencian path and the Xunzian path, and then the overall question of the post being "is Confucian a Mencian or a Xunzian?" I think the question of "transformation" is not one that Mencius has much to worry about, since it's a matter of "extension" not radical transformation. For Xunzi, it's the opposite.

I hear that you will be visiting Beijing while I'm there. Perhaps we can drink some brown bagged Qingdao 40 oz beers at Tsinghua's southern gate. As the brown-bagged 40's get put away, we can figure out once and for all who is better...that scalawag Mencius or the gentlemanly Xunzi.

:)

[Peony]

Brown-bagged Qingdao sounds really good right now, doesn't it?? Now Sam and/or Chris (I think we lost Baumler) does Mencius actually *say* somewhere that what is being shaped is human nature? If so, I would love to see that quote in Chinese. Granted my reading is years ago (what can I say?) but... I do not recall that. Of course it is very possible I am just not remembering and/or my original reading of this had a bit to be desired in terms of thoroughness...

However-- culverts: yes. But are the culverts shaping human nature or are they rather shaping a certain human capacity (which in tern can affect the self)? In any case, yes, Sam is right, I was thinking in terms of Mencius-- just not thinking in terms of this having anything to do with human nature as far as a basis for considering practices.

So, are you guys going to write a list of trivia about yourselves or what? Did you learn anything new about me or was it as you expected?

Believe it or not I have no idea what haut medoc is :(