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Ethics of Learning and Self-knowledge: Two cases in the Socratic and Confucian teachings
DUCK KWAK-JOO
Abstract
This paper attempts to do a comparative study on two traditions of humanistic pedagogies, West and East, represented by the Socratic and the Confucian teachings. It is intended to put into question our common misunderstanding reflected in the stereotyped contrasts between the Socratic self and the Confucian self: an intellectualist vs. a moralist, an active vs. a passive learner, and a political progressive vs. a political conservative. In this attempt, I will focus on the clarification of the idea of âself-knowledgeâ in each thinker, especially in its connection to our being virtuous or good. This bold attempt will give us a chance to view Socratic and Confucian teachings from an unfamiliar perspective, which will in turn lead us to see where and how the two thinkersâ teachings can converge and diverge in a new light for our humanistic teaching. It will also show how a comparative study in philosophy of education can contribute to constructive intercultural conversations.
1. Introduction: Two Different Ethics of Learning from Two Traditions
The Anglo-European discourse around âthe end of philosophyâ in the late twentieth century has brought up a big shift in the notion of philosophy from a
theoretical pursuit for truth into praxis, i.e. an activity for
practical wisdom or even an art of living, as more clearly specified by Richard Rory and Michel Foucault among others. This shift resonates of the ancient notion of philosophy well capsulated in Blumenbegâs expression, âsince ancient times theory (philosophy) was supposed to make life happyâ (Blumenberg, 1983, p. 232). It also seems to be aligned to the Confucian notion of âlearningâ (
) as a whole-hearted pursuit of tao (
), the way to become âa good personâ represented by a noble man (
) or a sage (
). I suspect that what always drew my East Asian sensibility into the tradition of western philosophy might be the
semblance between these two ancient notions of philosophy in their fundamental spirit, namely their common orientation in which âethicsâ (or philosophy as ethics) is essentially associated to âlearningâ. This means that learning for both traditions is considered inherently associated with a matter of how to find the right way to conduct our lives to become good persons. The best thinkers who represent this orientation from the two traditions can be said to be Socrates and Confucius.
However, the commonality of both traditions appears to end here in most of comparative studies on two traditions, East and West. For example, Li (2012) makes a sharp contrast between two traditions on the concept of learning in her book Cultural Foundations of Learning. Rightly pointing out that the idea of learning has cultural foundations, she claims that in following the Socratic tradition, the West values the rational individual mind that is trained to interrogate the world and become its master, whereas, based on the Confucian tradition, the East values learning for a moral virtue and moral self-perfection. In other words, Westerners tend to define learning cognitively, while Asians tend to define it morally. Here Jin Li seems to underestimate the ethical nature and implication of the Socratic teaching by being too much focused on the cultural differences supposedly derived from the Socratic and Confucian traditions.
Yu (2005) is more subtle on this issue in her paper entitled âthe beginning of ethics: Confucius and Socratesâ. She claims that both thinkers are the founders of ethics for each tradition and attempt to link doing ethics with learning virtues. But, according to Yu, they differ about what the virtues are and how to pursue them. A distinct difference between them, Yu notes, that they had different attitudes toward their given traditional and social values. Socrates appears to be critical of them in encouraging his interlocutors to call them into question, and Confucius cherishes them as a cultural transmitter, instructing his disciples to conform to them. In Yuâs conclusion (2005, pp. 184â185), for Socrates, ethics and learning are a matter of critical examination of oneâs moral beliefs in pursuit of virtue as an intellectual process; and for Confucius, they are a matter of acquiring and practicing a unified right moral knowledge in pursuit of virtue as a full-fledged development of moral character. This tells us that, for both thinkers, the purpose of learning lies in acquiring moral virtues, but that the moral virtues are differently defined, especially in their relations to given traditional and social values.
However, I wonder how legitimate or even useful this sort of contrasting approaches, which are framed to seek dichotomies between the two cultures, may be. It is likely to lead us either into an unsound yet convenient attribution of their relevance to modern pedagogies or an easy acceptance of cultural relativism. Thus, following Michael Petersâ suggestion on how to do comparative studies, I try to âbegin with a robust comparison of the question of self-knowledge construed as questions of âknowing oneselfâ in Socrates and (as questions of) âits relation to the Otherâ in Confuciusâ (Peters, 2015). This is an approach with the assumption that both thinkers address the same question, namely âHow should we live?â, and end up with an analogous answer, that is âself-knowledgeâ. This is to say that both ethics of learning in Socratic and Confucian teachings aspire for the acquisition of self-knowledge, which is a form of moral knowledge that affects us as moral beings.
This paper will consist of two parts: the Socratic teaching and the Confucian teaching. This attempt is motivated to put into question our common misunderstanding reflected in the stereotyped contrasts between the Socratic self and the Confucian self: an intellectualist vs. a moralist, an active vs. a passive learner, a political progressive vs. a political conservative, and so on. In this attempt, I will focus on the clarification of the idea of âself-knowledgeâ in each thinker, especially...
