Confucius’ Embodied Knowledge
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4312/as.2017.5.2.65-85Keywords:
embodiment theory, Confucianism, Analects, comparative philosophy, enactivismAbstract
The main purpose of the present article is to explicitly link the Analects to the embodiment theory (ET). As indicated in the introduction, embodiment has been an important topic in recent Sinological research, but until now rather few explicit connections have been made with the ET. In relation to the embodied knowledge, the article discusses the following topics: embodiment, embeddedness, enactment, extendedness, emotivity, implicitness, emergence, joy and apprenticeship or self-cultivation. The same themes are found to be important in the Analects, with a plethora of examples. Arguably ET could thus be a useful paradigm for discussing several important themes of the Analects. And the Analects being one of the founding texts of the Chinese philosophical tradition (though similar concerns are manifest also in other texts), it could also be beneficial to further developments in the ET itself, on the condition that its proponents familiarize themselves with the Chinese philosophical tradition where important issues of ET have been explicitly discussed for two and a half millennia.
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References
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Zhang, Yanhua. 2007. Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine. An Ethnographic Account from Contemporary China. New York: SUNY.
Zito, Angela, and Tani E. Barlow, eds. 1994. Body Subject, and Power in China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ames, Roger, Wimal Dissanayake, and Thomas P. Kasulis, eds. 1994. Self as Person in Asian Theory and Practice. New York: SUNY.
Clark, Andy. 1998. Being There. Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Bradford: Bradford Books.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi. 2014. Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology. Springer.
Damasio, Antonio. 1994. Descartes’ Error. Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. New York: Avon Books.
Dawson, Michael. 2014. “Embedded and situated cognition.” In The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, edited by Lawrence Shapiro, 59–67. London-New York: Routledge.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.
Despeux, Catherine. 2005. “Visual Representations of the Body in Chinese Medical and Daoist Texts from the Song to the Qing Period (Tenth to Nineteenth Century).” Asian Medicine 1 (1): 10–52.
Emerson, John. 1996. “Yang Chu’s Discovery of the Body.” Philosophy East and West 46 (4): 533–66.
Gallagher, Shaun, and Daniel Schmicking, eds. 2010. Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Springer.
Geaney, Jane. 2002. On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Hall, David L., and Roger T. Ames. 1998. “Chinese philosophy.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed September 5, 2016. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/chinese-philosophy/v-1/.
Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time. New York: SUNY Press.
Hsu, Elisabeth. 2007. “The Experience of Wind in Early and Medieval Chinese Medicine.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13: S117–S134. J
ackson, Michael. 1983. “Knowledge of the Body.” Man 18 (2): 32–7345.
Jones, David. 2008. Confucius Now. Contemporary Encounters with the Analects. Chicago: Open Court.
Jullien, François. 2007. Vital Nourishment. New York: Zone Books.
Jung, Carl Gustav. 1971. “Psychological Types.” Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Vol. 6, 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jung, Hwa Yol. 2011. Transversal Rationality and Intercultural Texts. Essays in Phenomenology and Comparative Philosophy. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Kohn, Livia, ed. 2006. Daoist Body Cultivation. Traditional Models and Contemporary Practices. Three Pines Press.
Kuriyama, Shigehisa. 2002. The Expressiveness of the Body. New York: Zone Books.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Lewis, Mark Edward. 2006. The Construction of Space in Early China. New York: SUNY Press.
Li, Zehou. 2010. The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Maiese, Michelle. 2011. Embodiment, Emotion, and Cognition. Besingstoke: Pelgrave Macmillan.
–––. 2014. “Body and Emotion.” In The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, edited by Lawrence Shapiro, 231–9. London and New York: Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1945. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard.
Nakamura, Hajime. 1964. Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples. Honolulu: EastWest Center Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. Will to Power. Edited, with Commentary by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.
–––. 2006. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A Book for All and None. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Noë, Alva, and Evan Thompson, eds. 2002. Vision and Mind. Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Polanyi, Michael. 1962. Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. London: Routledge.
Schipper, Kristofer. 1978. “The Taoist Body.” History of Religions 17 (3/4): 355–86.
Shapiro, Lawrence, ed. 2014. The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition. London and New York: Routledge.
Sivin, Nathan. 1995. “State, Cosmos, and Body in The Last Three Centuries B.C.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 55 (1): 5–37.
Slingerland, Edward. 2003. Confucius’ Analects with Selections from Traditional Commentaries. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett.
Sommer, Deborah. 2008. “Boundaries of the Ti Body.” Asia Major 2 (3): 293–324.
Spinoza, Baruch. 2002. Complete Works. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett.
Sterckx, Roel. 2003. “Le Pouvoir du Sens: Sagesse et Perception Sensorielle en Chine Ancienne.” In Cahiers d’Institut Marcel Granet 1. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Strejcek, Brendan, and Chen-Bo Zhong. 2014. “Morality in the Body.” The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, edited by Lawrence Shapiro, 220–30. London and New York: Routledge.
Uexküll, Jakob von. 1926. Theoretical Biology. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.
–––. 1957. “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds. Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, edited and translated by Claire H. Schiller, 5–80. New York: International Universities Press.
Varela, Francisco, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 1991. The Embodied Mind. Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Wang, Robin 2010. “The Virtuous Body at Work: The Ethical Life as Qi 氣 in Motion.” Dao, 339–51.
Ward, Dave, and Mog Stapleton. 2012. “Es are Good: Cognition as Enacted, Embodied, Embedded, Affective and Extended.” In Consciousness in Interaction: The Role of the Natural and Social Environment in Shaping Consciousness, edited by Fabio Paglieri, 89–104. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Wilson, Robert A., and Lucia Foglia. 2015. “Embodied Cognition.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed September 5, 2016. http://plato.stanford. edu/entries/embodied-cognition/.
Yu, Shunde Characters, ed. 2015. Shentigan de zhuanxiang Characters (Changing Directions in Bodily Feeling). Taibei: Taibei chuban zhongxin.
Zhang, Yanhua. 2007. Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine. An Ethnographic Account from Contemporary China. New York: SUNY.
Zito, Angela, and Tani E. Barlow, eds. 1994. Body Subject, and Power in China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Published
30.06.2017
How to Cite
OTT, M. (2017). Confucius’ Embodied Knowledge. Asian Studies, 5(2), 65–85. https://doi.org/10.4312/as.2017.5.2.65-85
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Body and Mind
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Copyright (c) 2017 Margus Ott
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