Table Of ContentCultivating a Good Life Introduction
Cultivating a Good Life
in Early Chinese and
Ancient Greek Philosophy
Also available from Bloomsbury
Comparative Philosophy without Borders, edited by Arindam Chakrabarti
and Ralph Weber
Landscape and Travelling East and West: A Philosophical Journey, edited by
Hans-Georg Moeller and Andrew K. Whitehead
Wisdom and Philosophy: Contemporary and Comparative Approaches, edited by
Hans-Georg Moeller and Andrew K. Whitehead
Cultivating a Good Life
in Early Chinese and
Ancient Greek Philosophy
Perspectives and Reverberations
Edited by
Karyn Lai, Rick Benitez, and Hyun Jin Kim
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Copyright © Karyn Lai, Rick Benitez and Hyun Jin Kim, 2019
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Contents
Introduction Karyn Lai, Rick Benitez, and Hyun Jin Kim 1
Part One Harmony, Balance, Beauty: Understanding Conceptions
of Cultivation 3
1 Cultivation and Harmony: Plato and Confucius Rick Benitez 7
2 Cultivating Noble Simplicity (Euētheia): Plato Lee M. J. Coulson 20
3 The Beauty Ladder and the Mind-Heart Excursion:
Plato and Zhuangzi Wang Keping 32
4 Awareness and Spontaneity: Three Perspectives
in the Zhuangzi Lisa Raphals 49
5 Understanding ‘Dao’s Patterns’: Han Fei Barbara Hendrischke 68
Part Two Doubt, Predicament, Conflict: Cognitive, Affective,
and Epistemic Difficulties 81
6 Skepsis and Doubt: Ancient Greece and the East
Yasuhira Yahei Kanayama 85
7 Wisdom and Cognitive Conflict: Benign Perplexity in the
Outlines of Scepticism Per Lind 104
8 Understanding Fortune and Misfortune in a Good Life: ‘Solon’ and
‘Confucius’ Hyun Jin Kim and Karen Kai-Nung Hsu 132
9 Emotion and Self-Cultivation: Marcus Aurelius and Mengzi
Jesse Ciccotti 149
10 Dislodging Mundane Wisdom: The Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi
and the New Testament Gospels Lauren F. Pfister 162
Part Three Here, Now, Ever-after: How to Practise and Achieve a Good Life 175
11 Knowing How to Act: Aristotle Sophie Grace Chappell 177
12 Learning to Be Reliable: Confucius’ Analects Karyn Lynne Lai 193
13 Auditory Perception and Cultivation: The Wenzi 文子 Andrej Fech 208
vi Contents
14 Cultivation and the Arts of Writing: Liu Xie Will Buckingham 221
15 Death and Happiness: Han China Mu-Chou Poo 237
List of Contributors 253
Index 255
Cultivating a Good Life Introduction
Introduction
Karyn Lai, Rick Benitez, and Hyun Jin Kim
What does it take to live well? Ancient Chinese and Greek philosophy present accounts
or models of life lived well: a Confucian junzi, a Daoist sage and a Greek phronimos.
Philosophical discussions in these traditions bring to light pictures of a good life. Yet,
living well is not simply about having the right kinds of goals nor is it just about how
particular activities are performed. A richer account of a good life is enhanced by
understanding how it is cultivated.
The contributors to this volume explored these issues at a conference held at the
University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, from 15 to 18 January 2016. The
rigorous but convivial cross-tradition discussions on the conference theme ‘In pursuit
of wisdom: Ancient Chinese and Greek perspectives on cultivation’ have enriched,
challenged, and broadened our thinking on the ways to a good life.
In this volume, the contributors articulate and build on some of these insights by
investigating processes associated with cultivating or nurturing the self in order to live
such lives. What is involved in developing practical wisdom, nurturing the exercise
of reason, cultivating equanimity, fostering reliability, learning to respond fittingly,
developing a knack, and so on?
Living a good life also requires gaining some reflective distance from conventional
values and pursuits in order to re-orientate oneself towards authentic, grounded, or
embedded views of life. A good life can involve attunement with, and sometimes
rejection of, existing institutions, frameworks, and relationships. How do we refine our
capabilities, including our emotions, understanding, wisdom, and sensory capacities?
How does practice allow us to act both spontaneously and reliably, yet not merely
habitually? How do we live lives that incorporate beauty and harmony? How do our
beliefs about death and the afterlife, as well as burial practices, reflect our perspectives
on life? These questions are explored in this volume, drawing on cross-traditional
insights to deepen our understanding of cultivation.
We examine early Chinese and ancient Greek perspectives of cultivation both
because they provide effective distance from contemporary values and because they
offer an array of reflections and motivating arguments that may still be useful to us
today. Our primary aim is not to understand one perspective by way of the other,
nor to provide a historical account of the transmission of ideas. Rather, our interest
is in the cultivation of a good life per se. Thus, the orientation of this volume is not
fundamentally comparative. Where comparisons are made (and several of the essays
are comparative), the point is that comparison can sharpen a conception of cultivation,
either through contrast or by means of additional contexts, examples, or analogies.
2 Cultivating a Good Life
Where comparisons are not made, we still expect the presentation of Chinese and
Greek thinking on related issues to provoke reflection, including reflection about the
way that a cultural perspective might influence the conception of a good life. Other
civilisations besides China and Greece may present similar value for reflection, but
these two seem both independently rich enough and sufficiently similar to each other
for the purpose of jointly enhancing thinking about cultivation.
This book is arranged in three sections that comprise a dialectic of cultivation. The
first part – Harmony, Balance, Beauty – sets out basic positive ideals of what is to
be cultivated. The second – Doubt, Predicament, Conflict – explores the inevitable
cognitive and epistemic difficulties that result from application of these ideals to
practical life. The third – Here, Now, Ever-After – concerns putting wisdom about a
good life into practice, both immediately and across a full lifetime. Taken together, the
sections of the book provide both cognitive and practical insight into the nature of a
good life.
In bringing the conference and this volume together, we wish to thank New
College – and especially its attentive conference administrator, Edwina Hine – for
hosting the conference. The conference was supported by grants from two sources:
an Australian Research Council DECRA (Discovery Early Career Researcher Award)
granted to Hyun Jin Kim for the project The Transfer of Global Hegemony: Geopolitical
Revolutions in World History, and a Conference Subvention Grant awarded by the
School of Humanities and Languages, the University of New South Wales, Australia.
Finally, we are grateful to the participants at the conference for their inspiring ideas,
their smiles and contributions at early morning and late afternoon papers, and the
ongoing friendships.
Note on the cover image. We sought an image of a tree for its allusions to wisdom.
More specifically, we wanted not just any tree but a Moreton Bay Fig because it signifies
an Australian context, which is where we live. It has profound significance for the three
of us, with our roots in different parts of the world, now working and living in Australia.
And the book is a result of international collaborative work, involving colleagues who
came to Australia to discuss these ideas with us. The photo captures the physical
context within which the book’s discussions arose, and suggests the continuous activity
and interconnectedness that we think the cultivation of a good life involves.
K. L, R. B, H. J. K
Cultivating a Good Life Harmony, Balance, Beauty: Understanding Conceptions of Culti-
vation
Part One
Harmony, Balance, Beauty:
Understanding Conceptions
of Cultivation
The chapters in this part explore how the themes of harmony, balance, and beauty
are manifest in ancient Greek and Chinese philosophy. They reveal the complexity
of harmony, situating the individual within social, ethical, political, and cosmological
contexts. Maintenance of harmony in these domains may require compromises on the
part of individuals as he or she learns to balance competing loyalties and adjudicate
between norms, practices, and ideals. Balance is required in expressions of human
agency at a range of levels: between (a life of) simplicity and complexity, between a
norm-driven life and one that is more spontaneous, and between emotional reactions
and cultivated responses. In the views of individual thinkers across both traditions, the
themes of harmony and balance incorporate a sense of beauty. Beauty is found not only
in our appreciation of the aesthetic elements in life, but also in patterns, proportions,
and pictures of spiritual and intellectual freedom.
Rick Benitez explores the conception of harmony between individual and society
in both Plato and Confucius. He first shows how certain background conceptions of
harmony lead both Plato and Confucius to the idea that the cultivation of a harmonious
life only makes sense within the context of a flourishing society. The apparent differences
between Plato and Confucius can be softened by recognising that Confucius thought
Chinese civilisation provided a proper foundation for such a society, whereas Plato
did not think Greek civilisation provided such a foundation. Thus, where Confucius is
socially conservative, Plato is a social reformist. Both philosophers, however, share the
view that when customs and habits are rectified, the true harmony of the person is to be
found in conformity to socially established practices. True wisdom, then, is cultivated
through reflection on society, and on the rectification and understanding of social
practice. Both Plato and Confucius think that the cultivation and practice of music,
widely understood as the virtuous expression of society’s most deeply cherished values,
shows the greatest wisdom and harmony possible for a person. The greatest music of
this sort is expressed not only in philosophy, poetry, and art, but also in civic virtue and
public service. Confucian and Platonic harmony is anything but spontaneous – it is a
result of a lifetime of training and practice.
Lee Coulson examines the concept of simplicity (euētheia) as it appears in Plato,
with some additional reflection on simplicity in Chinese philosophy, particularly in
