Growing Moral: A Confucian Guide to Life

"The reason I picked this book is because too many of our discussions here in the West about morality, character, etc. tend to be rooted in the Western tradition. This semester at City College in New York, I’m going to be teaching a course that we call ancient philosophy , but that’s a misnomer. It’s Greco-Roman ancient philosophy. I’m not going to teach any Buddhism or Confucianism, partly because I don’t know enough about them to teach them and partly because we do have special courses for those. But there is this tendency to think of ancient philosophy in terms of the Greeks and the Romans. But, as much as I love the Greeks and the Romans, there’s plenty of other traditions that do need to be taken into account in this context. Angle’s book is a good one from that perspective, for a couple of reasons. It’s essentially the equivalent of my book, How To Be a Stoic . That is, it talks about Confucianism as it was, as it originated, and how it has evolved over time, but he’s mostly concerned about articulating a vision of what Confucianism might look like today, and how modern Confucians might address some contemporary issues and also how that might change or alter, to some extent, the original philosophy or at least the take on certain issues that the early Confucians had. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Confucianism is often, rightly I think, accused of being somewhat conservative in terms of values. It’s about a patriarchal structure, a particular family structure, about respecting rules, etc. etc. But Angle makes an interesting argument—whether you buy it or not, you’ll have to read the book—that the basic Confucian ideas can be evolved and adapted to a 21st-century, more multicultural setting. It’s a good way of looking at the issue because this happens with all ancient traditions. Modern Buddhists don’t subscribe to the same beliefs as the early Buddhists had. Modern Christians don’t necessarily believe all the things or act in the ways in which early Christians were acting. So if religions which are notoriously somewhat rigid can evolve over time and in fact have evolved over time in order to adapt to modern circumstances, certainly philosophies of life can do the same. Angle’s book is a good example of how to do that with a non-western tradition. You should talk to Stephen about that. I agree. When I started reading the book, that was my initial reaction: ‘I’m curious to see how this guy is going to work his way through this because it seems very difficult to me.’ But the strategy that Angle uses is the same or very similar to the one that I’ve seen used by other authors. For instance, Robert Wright, in Why Buddhism is True , tries to do a similar thing with Buddhism. Or, again, in my own book, How to Be a Stoic . You don’t focus on every single word that the ancient Confucians were writing, you try to put that into the historical and cultural context of the time. You raise your bar to the more abstract level of the generalities, the general ideas, the general framework that a particular philosophy puts forth and then, from there, you work your way to modern times and ask, ‘Okay, so how would that work today?’ So yes, there is certainly a very strong component of patriarchy and rigidity in ancient Confucianism. But if you turn that into ‘we ought to have respect for people who are more experienced, we ought not to discard the opinions of people just because they’re old’ that becomes pretty valuable in a modern setting. Insofar as women are concerned, certainly the original Confucianism had nothing to do with feminism. But once we move into a society which is inherently multicultural and multi gender, then if the focus is, ‘I need to be respectful and listen to whoever has enough experience that might have something to contribute’ then that makes it easier to update to modern times. Yes, it resonates with us, doesn’t it?"