Confucius and the Meaning of Life

Human Affairs, 2019

Why Be Moral?, 2015

and manyo thers, It aket he "meaning" in "the meaning of life" to have much to do with worth or value. Discussions of the meaning of life complain that life does not have sufficient worth, or wonder what might give life sufficient value, or celebrate the finding of something of sufficienti mportance in life, etc. (In what follows Iw ill use the terms worth, value,a nd importance interchangeably.)Take, for example, Tolstoy'snarration, in his semi-autobiographical My Confession,ofhow he came to feel that his life was not meaningful. At acertain point in his life he started looking at all he had achievedand asking himself "What of it?" and "So what?" He was the greatest Russian author: so what?H e owned alot of land: what of it?(Tolstoy 1983, pp. 26-27). Isuggest thatthe "so what?" and "what of it?" questions exclaim that what seemed to him of sufficient worth stopped appearingso. What troubled Tolstoy was the feeling thata ll that has been described abovew as not in fact of sufficientv alue. Similarly,T homas Nagel (1986) argues thatf rom the objective, broad perspective of the whole cosmos and time, sub specie aeternitatis,o ur livesa re not as meaningful as we would like them to be. He mentions that,s een from that broad perspective,o ur influenceo nt he world is negligible; if we had not lived, nothing much would have changed, in the long run, for the world at large.P ut differently, seen from the broad perspective,o ur death and our life are inconsequential or unimportant.Moreover,our cominginto existenceiscontingent: we could have easilyn ot been born.N agel'sa rguments suggest that, from the sub speciea eternitatis perspective,o ur livesd on ot seem to have much value; he is discussingt he insufficient worth of human beings(when seen from that broad perspective). Discussions Ihavehad with people who thought thattheirlives weremeaningless, or weres earchingf or what would make them more meaningful, also confirm that thosep eople were preoccupied with issues of worth and value in

Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 2018

This paper is intended to examine the ethical paradigm of the good life constructed in the early Confucian texts, in contrast with the clear tendency to the rational paradigm as ascribed in the ancient Greek philosophy. To fully appreciate the Confucian paradigm, we will investigate how joy becomes the central concern for early Confucians and what categories it is classified through discourses on wisdom and virtue. We will argue that joy, wisdom and virtue underlie the theme of learning to be human and is both the necessary ingredient and the consequence of the good life in early Confucianism.

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The question of the meaning and meaningfulness 1 of life has come to be neglected by today's philosophers. Meaning is implicitly assumed to be associated with individual choices and preferences. This article sets out by arguing that meaningfulness works in another way as well. It points out that we are appealed by something that provokes meaningfulness. The article then elaborates on the consequences of this vision, one of these being that there may well be implicit 'standards'. Some authors writing on meaningfulness or related subjects indeed believe that this is the case, but the point made here is that certain benchmarks -i.e. references concerned with our 'being-in-the-world' -have not been explored fully enough.

Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love, 2015

The question, "What is the meaning of life?" was once taken to be a paradigm of philosophical inquiry. Perhaps, outside of the academy, it still is. In philosophy classrooms and academic journals, however, the question has nearly disappeared, and when the question is brought up, by a naïve student, for example, or a prospective donor to the cause of a liberal arts education, it is apt to be greeted with uncomfortable embarrassment. What is so wrong with the question? One answer is that it is extremely obscure, if not downright unintelligible. It is unclear what exactly the question is supposed to be asking. Talk of meaning in other contexts does not offer ready analogies for understanding the phrase "the meaning of life." When we ask the meaning of a word, for example, we want to know what the word stands for, what it represents. But life is not part of a language, or of any other sort of symbolic system. It is not clear how it could "stand for" anything, nor to whom. We sometimes use "meaning" in nonlinguistic contexts: "Those dots mean measles." "Those footprints mean that someone was here since it rained." In these cases, talk of meaning seems to be equivalent to talk of evidence, but the contexts in which such claims are made tend to specify what hypotheses are in question within relatively fixed bounds. To ask what life means without a similarly specified context, leaves us at sea. Still, when people do ask about the meaning of life, they are evidently expressing some concern or other, and it would be disingenuous to insist that the rest of us haven't the faintest idea what that is. The question at least gestures toward a certain set of concerns with which most of us are at least somewhat familiar. Rather than dismiss a question with which many people have been passionately occupied as pure and simple nonsense, it seems more appropriate to try to interpret it and reformulate it in a way that can be more clearly and unambiguously understood. Though there may well be many things going on when people ask, "What is the meaning of life?", the most central among them seems to be a search to find a purpose or a point to human existence. It is a request to find out why we are here (that is, why we exist at all), with the hope that an answer to this question will also tell us something about what we should be doing with our lives. If understanding the question in this way, however, makes the question intelligible, it might not give reason to reopen it as a live philosophical problem. Indeed, if some of professional philosophy's discomfort with discussion of the meaning of life comes from a desire to banish ambiguity and obscurity from the field, as much comes, I think, from the thought that the question, when made clearer, has already been answered, and that the answer is depressing. Specifically, if the question of the Meaning of Life is to be identified with the question of the purpose of life, then the standard view, at least among professional philosophers, would seem to be that it all depends on the existence of God. In other words, the going opinion seems to be that if there is a God, then there is at least a chance that there is a purpose, and so

The question whether life has any meaning is difficult to interpret. This is the big question-the hardest to answer, the most urgent and at the same time the most obscure. The more we concentrate our critical faculty on it the more it seems to elude us, or to evaporate as any intelligible question. For millennia, thinkers have addressed the question of what, if anything, makes a life meaningful in some form or other. The basic idea of the question of life's meaning is depicted, to rethink the age-old question again, in this article by tracing the right sense of the quest under the first title to avoid ambiguity and by presenting the significance of the question and basic categories of the answer.

In this essay, I present the accounts of well-being found in the texts of Mencius and Xunzi with a particular focus on the following two claims: (1) Virtue is a fundamental component of well-being, and (2) A flourishing life exemplifies a teleological structure ordered toward sagehood. I also describe their views concerning the characteristics of the mental states of those who are virtuous, qualities that I argue bear a striking resemblance to Daniel Haybron's emotional state account of psychological happiness.

Is virtue good not only for others, but also for the virtuous person herself? Call the "yes" answer to this question "the eudaimonistic thesis." In this paper, I argue that Confucius has something to contribute to the issue. I argue, first of all, that the most prominent explanation for why Confucius accepted the eudaimonistic thesis should be rejected; this explanation is that he accepts the thesis because he accepts "naturalistic perfectionism" or that for something to be good for us is for it to realize our nature and that being a virtuous person realizes human nature. In its place, I propose two alternative explanations: the "hedonistic explanation," which justifies the eudaimonistic thesis in terms of pleasure, and the "desirability explanation," which provides a justification rooted in the claims that virtuous people function as normative measures and that they desire that they themselves be virtuous. Finally, I argue that the Confucian versions of these two justifications possess some important advantages over their Ancient Western counterparts.