Preparing to Teach "Confucius"

   Alan, over at Frog in a Well, has a post up about teaching Confucius.  He raises an interesting question:

...It has long been accepted that at least some bits of Analects are much later than Confucius, and that some classical texts were created through accretion over a period of time (Guanzi, the outer chapters of Zhuangzi, etc.) Applying this model to the Analects is of course going to ruffle feathers, but there is nothing revolutionary about the idea itself. It does present problems, however, for those who want to teach the period. While we are in the process of deconstructing and reconstructing Confucius what do you do in class? There are two poles to this debate. One is the E. Bruce Brooks position, which seems to be that until you have the philology 100% down you don’t say anything.  Another pole is the Charles Hayford position. Long ago, after reading Luke Kwong’s Mosaic of the Hundred Days in a graduate seminar I asked him how the book would change his teaching of 1898. He said in effect that at least for this semester he would not change anything, since he was not sure what to make of things.

      Alan links to this post by Brooks to illustrate what is meant by "you don't say anything" - and that is you cannot really do history without an extensive philological introduction, describing the nature of the texts themselves.  History, in this sense, becomes philology.  But I agree with Alan, who says later on that he "leans toward the latte pole" - i.e. getting on with the telling and writing of history anyway (if you link through to Brooks you will see that "anyway" is, for him, a bad word.)

     We can do history, and philosophy and other things, without belaboring the philological points.  Yes, of course, the Analects are an accretion; they are not the work of Confucius, but of various people at various times that come after him.  That point can be very important for certain intellectual pursuits, but for others it is not all that earth shattering.

    In my case, I teach a tutorial using the classic texts in translation (Analects, Mencius, Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, Han Fei Tzu).  That's pretty much all we do: read these texts.  But my purpose is different than Alan's, and certainly different than Brooks'.  I am not, as is Alan, teaching "the period."  It is not a history class.  Of course, we do read a bit of history to understand certain references in the texts and to gain a minimal appreciation of their original context.  But the main goal is to try to understand what these texts can mean now, in our own time.

     I would imagine that Brooks would find this kind of project fundamentally illegitimate, since it quite consciously takes the texts out of their original context.  I don't worry about it, however.  Seems to me that these texts do exist in our own time, they can mean something in a contemporary context, and working to understand what that contemporary meaning might be is as good and legitimate as any other intellectual pursuit. As long as students know that coming in - and that is what I tell them - then they can join or not at their choice.

      The question of "what do you do in class," then, is a bit different for me.  I have, in the past, pointed out the composite nature of the original text.  I could go further, however.  I think what I might do this time around (thanks, Alan, for raising this question and making me think about it) is to suggest that the notion of "Confucius" has always been a composite.  It has never had a singular and unchanging quality.  We invoke the name "Confucius" as if it were an individual - and, yes, there was a historical individual of that name - but the connotation always exceeds that individual.  "Confucius," like "Confucianism," has come to summarize a centuries-long intellectual debate among hundreds and hundreds of learned readers of a variety of texts in various times and places.  Zhu Xi referred to "Confucius" and interpreted him and presented an understanding of "his" texts just as Roger Ames has done.  The two are obviously quite different.  They have played different historical roles.  They each extend and revise the meaning of "Confucius" that may have existed before them.  Is one closer to the "real" Confucius?  No, not if we give up on the idea of a "real" Confucius, as we must since he is beyond our capacity to apprehend (prisoner as he has always been to the additions and revisions and interpretations of others, even in the foundational text of The Analects).

     Let me be even more pointed (that is what blogging is about, after all).  I really don't care about the "real" Confucius.  I don't care if he personally wrote any particular passage in the Analects or anything else.  What I care about is the meaning we have attached to the name "Confucius" at various historical moments.  The "Confucius" of the Han is not the "Confucius" of the late Qing and is not the "Confucius" of Yu Dan.  None is somehow transcendentally authentic; each is a reflection of its own time and purposes.  That is how ideas and texts work.

UPDATE: Chris takes the conversation to another philosophical level....

Comments

[CW Hayford]

Yogi Berra is said to have said "half the things I said I never said." Although I have no memory of it, what Alan attributes to me is sensible and probably true.

As it happens, last night I did a class session on Confucius myself. After explaining that, as you put it so well, that no one Confucius is "transcendentally authentic," my conclusion there are "two, three, many Confucii." Do you suppose that this is the "authentic" plural of Confucius?

[chriswaugh_bj]

I vote for 孔子们 as the authentic plural.

[Chris]

Sam,

For some reason, I just can't seem to figure out how to work a trackback. In any case, I put up my own 2c on this great question over at my place.

[zoomzan]

The solution is to separate theology from the secular academy. By theology, I refer to the study of Classics as done in pre-modern China. I term it theology, because its basic premise is that the Classics are qualitatively different from other books. This basic premise is shared by Christian and Islamic theologies.

Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and Christians have no problem doing the same thing with their respective sacred texts.

In the end, academic fashions come and go. (Such as the innumerable controversies of biblical archeology.) But religion is everlasting. (Such as Zhuxi and Wang Yangming's philosophies.)

[zoomzan]

The above is confirmed by Confucius and Mencius's own treatment of the Classics. Neither Confucius nor Mencius cared about the "original meaning" of the Classics. Instead, they cared about the relevance of the Classics in their own times. And they cared about their personal relationships with the Classics.

This is quite clear when you read Confucius's interpretation of poems. Mencius reinterpreted ancient customs to suit his own views. Quite clearly, both Confucius and Mencius were practitioners of creative exegesis.

[Chris]

Zoomzan:

Good points. I think this is pretty much what I was trying to get at myself in my own post on the subject. Just as much as Confucius (and Mencius) re-appropriated the past (through ritual, poems, stories) in order to enter into a "dialog" with their current world, students should be encouraged to do the same with the Analects.