Welcome to Wisdom NOTES: A short transcript summary capturing insights from conversations on In Search of Wisdom. This edition comes from my interview with Stephen Angle, the author of Growing Moral: A Confucian Guide to Life.
Growing Moral: A Confucian Guide to Life
In this episode, my guest is Stephen Angle, the author of Growing Moral: A Confucian Guide to Life. Stephen is a philosophy writer and researcher specializing in Chinese Philosophy, Confucianism, Neo-Confucianism, and comparative philosophy. His research focuses on philosophy’s role in human rights, politics, and ethics. Learn more at: https://sangle.faculty.wesleyan.edu/
In the conversation, Stephen and I discuss,
Confucianism as a Way of Life
The power of rituals
How to embody your reading
The wisdom of reflection
Confucian wisdom in daily life and much more
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1. What is Confucianism?
Wisdom Note #1: For any listeners that are new to Confucianism. How do you answer the question: “What is Confucianism?”
Angle: Well, one kind of question could be, is it a religion? Is it philosophy? How should we think about it in that light? And that's complicated; if you have a very inclusive understanding of what a religion is, then it is, among other things, a religion. But I think what's important for us here is that it is a human teaching.
The great thinkers of the tradition were not prophets; they were wise people who were reflecting on their traditions and on their societies and trying to think about how we humans can best live in the world. So that meant they couldn't just rely on the fact that God had revealed something. They had to explain why we should live the way they argued. So that makes it philosophy. Right? […]
More specifically, I think that Confucianism offers a way to think about who we are as people and how we should live in relationship to one another and to the cosmos that we inhabit. That starts very much from our sort of social embeddedness — concretely from the fact that we are born into a family. And there are others around who raised us, so thinking about ourselves in relation to others is very fundamental to Confucianism. […]
