#xunzi

Confucianismo

El confucianismo es una filosofía desarrollada en China en el siglo VI a.C. Muchos la consideran un sistema de creencias secular y humanista; otros, la consideran una religión y también los hay que la ven como un código social. El amplio rango de temas que trata el confucianismo se presta a validar cualquiera de esas tres interpretaciones; depende del aspecto en el que se enfoque.

I. A long prologue on the preconditions of an answer

Thanks for the great question: it's also a hard question to answer! (I've answered a similar question here, but this answer is quite different.) Already at the start, I have to avoid three traps in answering.

The first is including works I've been puzzled and fascinated by, but do not fully understand and so have not been sufficiently influential in the way I'm thinking of. (Examples: Jung and koans. I can talk about them with some plausibility, but do I really understand them? Being honest with myself, I don't.)

The second is including works which easily come to mind because I've enjoyed them, but which haven't been sufficiently influential either. (Lots of science fiction I've read fall under this category.) The third is making a list solely of classics, since I run the risk of making an uninformative list of what everyone already knows---or even worse, having classics simply because they are high-prestige. (Examples: the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Three Kingdoms.) Having said that, many classics have been genuinely influential in my life, and I'll mention some of them later. But I want to make sure that I include more than just classics.

Even while avoiding these traps, I find some difficulties in answering for two more reasons. First, because I haven't been influenced by any single piece of art in particular so much as I've been influenced by artistic works in general.

Second, because even more influential has been my general attitude towards art and culture (to go up a level) rather than any works of art in themselves.

To name some of these attitudes:

I think that the best way to experience artistic works is in their context, by seeing what they're reacting to and against; I think it's useful to see artistic works as part of a coherent tradition for that reason (and this is also why theory is useful).

I don't think you can get a pure experience of artworks, but that they're always shaped by (often invisible) interpretive lenses; I think the best art is transformative (a very Xunzian view); I think there are no compulsory works of art because of this. What transforms each person is different, just because each person is different.

One of my favourite quotes here is from Borges (quoted in the epilogue to Professor Borges; the original citation is to the 1979 interview Borges para millones):

I believe that the phrase “obligatory reading” is a contradiction in terms; reading should not be obligatory. Should we ever speak of “obligatory pleasure”? What for? Pleasure is not obligatory, pleasure is something we seek. Obligatory happiness! We seek happiness as well.

For twenty years, I have been a professor of English Literature in the School of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires, and I have always advised my students: If a book bores you, leave it; don’t read it because it is famous, don’t read it because it is modern, don’t read a book because it is old. If a book is tedious to you, leave it, even if that book is Paradise Lost—which is not tedious to me—or Don Quixote—which also is not tedious to me. But if a book is tedious to you, don’t read it; that book was not written for you.

Reading should be a form of happiness, so I would advise all possible readers of my last will and testament—which I do not plan to write—I would advise them to read a lot, and not to get intimidated by writers’ reputations, to continue to look for personal happiness, personal enjoyment. It is the only way to read.

II. Donald Richie's Japanese Portraits

Having given that very long disclaimer, if I had to select just one work which has been most influential to me and which isn't a well-known classic, it would be Donald Richie's Japanese Portraits. (If you'd like to read even more on this, @transientpetersen has reviewed it here and I've added some comments on its impact on me here.)

Richie's Japanese Portraits combines so much of what I like and has influenced my style (to the extent to which I have one) and taste: short vignettes with psychological insight, fragmentary pieces which add up to a greater whole even if there's never a unitary picture being painted. It led me to other similar authors (like Italo Calvino, Lydia Davis, Kurt Vonnegut, Sei Shōnagon and Yoshida Kenkō and the zuihitsu/xiaopin genre. . .)

And---most importantly---reading the book was one of the events in my life that taught me how to notice people, how to love them. (I can vividly remember a time when I was very bad at both, and it was only with great effort from those around me that I managed to learn to love. And, of course, the influence of the book pales in comparison to the influence of the people who loved me, loving people, lovely people. Love is both attention and action, and I'm still learning.)

Richie has a gift for encapsulating the universal in the particular. Reading the book made me a better person, and that's the highest compliment I can give any piece of art.

III. Other works

Having tried to pick a most influential work, I would be remiss not to mention the many others that have influenced me, often to the same extent. I'll name just a few which immediately come to mind rather than give a full list. Much like William H. Gass's list, I'd probably come up with a different list on a different day.

There isn't any visual art or music on the list---not because of their lack of worth (Philip Glass, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds, Oasis, Mahler, and Shostakovich are all personally enjoyable and were influential at particular points!), but simply because I find it easier to cite, explain, and engage with texts, and so texts have been most influential for me. If you're interested, here's a bit on my musical tastes. Now, back to the list:

The Epic of Gilgamesh: Gilgamesh's faults are entirely human; it's a consoling book.

Sima Qian's Records of the Historian (read in the Yang and Yang translation): Ostensibly a book of history, but there's an entire ethos there of understanding the moments of rise and descent, of leaving when things are at their peak, of understanding the moment and waiting. I read it as a child and it was extremely influential in affecting how I behave up to now.

The Three Kingdoms (which I write about sometimes): I read this at around the same time as Sima Qian; the figure of Zhuge Liang exemplifies the tensions inherent when you try to combine the ethos of the Records with the actual prevailing situations.

Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art": There are so many times when I've reminded myself, "The art of losing isn't hard to master. . ."

Simon Leys's essay "The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past": It introduced an entirely new way of thinking about preserving history and memory to me.

Sociological theory, especially Weber, Durkheim, Goffman, and Foucault: They've all shaped my understanding of society and normality. I'm extremely sympathetic to the symbolic interactionists. Weber taught me to appreciate bureaucracy a little more, which has made me more patient while waiting on the telephone: now that's influential!

Key figures and texts within the various philosophical traditions: within the Chinese tradition, Xunzi and Dai Zhen; within the Indian tradition, the Dīgha Nikāya and Vasubandhu; within the Anglo-European tradition, Spinoza and Wittgenstein.

Gadamer's Truth and Method: I still don't fully understand it, but I was extremely influenced by his idea of the fusion of horizons. Some parts of it are pure poetry. When I read the passage where he says that nothing returns, I had a shiver down my spine.

Shen Fu's Six Records of a Floating Life: a depiction of love in a time very different from now, and all the more interesting and touching for that. My favourite passage is the part where Shen Fu and his wife Yün acknowledge the social pressures facing them, and talk about how they hope they can change positions in the next life to understand each other and to overcome these pressures:

Once I said to her, ‘It’s a pity that you are a woman and have to remain hidden away at home. If only you could become a man we could visit famous mountains and search out magnificent ruins. We could travel the whole world together. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?’ ‘What is so difficult about that?’ Yün replied. ‘After my hair begins to turn white, although we could not go so far as to visit the Five Sacred Mountains, we could still visit places nearer by. We could probably go together to Hufu and Lingyen, and south to the West Lake and north to Ping Mountain.’ ‘By the your hair begins to turn white, I’m afraid you will find it hard to walk,’ I told her. ‘Then if we can’t do it in this life, I hope we will do it in the next.’ ‘In our next life I hope you will be born a man,’ I said. ‘I will be a woman, and we can be together again.’ ‘That would be lovely,’ said Yün, ‘especially if we could still remember this life.’

There's so much encapsulated in this short passage: Shen Fu and Yün accept society's limitations while trying to transcend them within a framework they're familiar with, all while dwelling in the care and love and friendship between them. When I read this passage for the first time, I had to stop reading; I had started crying.

IV. On dealing with complexity

Most of the works which come to mind immediately are works of philosophy, theory, or nonfiction. This is no accident.

Life is complex, and there are at least two ways of dealing with the complexity of life. Philosophy tends to make it more explicit (although there are exceptions like Wittgenstein, where the very form of the Philosophical Investigations forces you to think in a particular way) and art tends to make it more implicit (although there are exceptions like programmatic music). In an interview, the philosopher David B. Wong recalls:

I remember taking a number of literature and mathematics courses, besides philosophy. Maybe philosophy combined the appeal of the other two fields for me—the clarity and systematic nature of mathematics and the focus on the human condition in literature.

I have a preference for the explicit, and so I prefer philosophy---but others with a different frame of mind may, for entirely valid reasons, prefer art.

For me, the one great advantage art has over philosophy is its greater pull on the emotions. Art helps build solidarity in a way philosophy doesn't (as Rorty points out). Philosophy does pull on the emotions: I've been happy or had shivers when reading philosophy, and sometimes I've been so excited that I had to get up and walk around before reading further. But I've never cried while reading philosophy, while I have cried before when reading literature.

Whenever I encounter debates on what is or isn’t religion — whether in the context of “religious freedom” and “separation of church and state,” who is or isn’t an atheist, or whatever — I frequently find myself asking participants (usually without reply) whether or not they consider Confucianism to be a religion.

Indeed, two questions for my readers:

Is Confucianism a religion?