Gongfu Philosophy and the Confucian Way of Freedom: Critical Reflections on Ni Peimin’s Confucius: The Man and the Way of Gongfu

In my view, cultivated spontaneity as developed by Ni (cf. Ni 2002) is a very important and ingenious insight that is hopeful of bringing the key of Confucian moral understanding and practice into dialogue with Western theories of freedom.3 In what follows, I would like to explore this concept furth...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inDao : a journal of comparative philosophy Vol. 17; no. 2; pp. 257 - 265
Main Author Wang, Huaiyu
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.06.2018
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Chinese
Chinese culture
Confucianism
Confucius (551-479 BC)
Cultural values
Dialogue
East-West relations
Education
Ethics
Freedoms
Morality
Non-Western Philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy of Religion
Religious Studies
Spontaneity
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Summary:In my view, cultivated spontaneity as developed by Ni (cf. Ni 2002) is a very important and ingenious insight that is hopeful of bringing the key of Confucian moral understanding and practice into dialogue with Western theories of freedom.3 In what follows, I would like to explore this concept further in relation to the Confucian way of freedom. For Confucius, this freedom as cultivated spontaneity represents an ideal state of gongfu: an ability to follow the will of one’s heart “without overstepping the line” (Analects 2.4, cited in Ni 2016: 96). In other words, while the process of gongfu cultivation needs to be constrained by “the line” as a normative guide for one’s actions, with the attainment of the cultivated spontaneity, “one naturally knows the proper lines of action and has no inclination to overstep them” (96).
ISSN:1540-3009
1569-7274
DOI:10.1007/s11712-018-9605-y