Abstract
In this paper, I argue that Confucian ethical practice can be considered as a viable method of creating and sustaining Whiteheadian beauty. I first investigate Whitehead’s understanding of value, beauty, and morality
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This is not to say that Confucianism has no theoretical contributions to make to the Whiteheadian tradition; in this study, however, I focus on the practical insights that the former has to offer to the latter.
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For example, learning to properly speak and act in accordance with various forms of Confucian ritual propriety is still a major, although informal, category of education in the household and school in contemporary East Asia.
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According to Whitehead, “All order is therefore aesthetic order, and the moral order is merely certain aspects of aesthetic order” (Whitehead 1930, p. 105).
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No page numbers are available for this online article.
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I use beauty, the beauty of experience, and emotional (or affective) harmony interchangeably in this study.
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As argued above, beauty for Whitehead is the perfection of harmony of an occasion of experience of which the major component is emotional, and this passage also expresses a state of maximal harmony (he 和) of emotions. I examine the resonances between the Whiteheadian and Confucian understandings of harmony in more detail below. Note that both Confucian harmony and Whiteheadian beauty are also cosmological notions.
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All quotes from the Analects are from Ames and Rosemont (1998).
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They also write: “Ren is…the achievement of the quality of relationships that, like the lines in fine calligraphy or sublime landscape painting, collaborate to create maximum aesthetic effect” (Rosemont and Ames 2009, p. 23). For further insights concerning the aesthetic dimensions of Confucian role ethics, see Ames (2011, p. 195). I continue this aesthetic interpretation of Confucian ethics as it pertains to Confucian moral cultivation below.
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For the Confucian and Whiteheadian, insofar as the process of creating beauty is not determined by isolated individuals but is one of coordination, and fulfilling one’s role means functioning properly within coordinative relationships, the process of creating beauty is one of fulfilling one’s role.
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Furthermore, Cobb argues: “At this point, Whitehead’s thought connects with that of ‘situation ethics.’ According to this view, obeying moral rules is not the answer. What is truly right can only be determined in the full concreteness of the situation. The advocates of situation ethics believe that useful though knowledge of past reflection can be for acting in the concreteness of the situation, ultimately we must trust our own spontaneous intuition” (Cobb 2002). I rely on Cobb here, insofar as Whitehead is relatively less explicit about his views concerning ethics than cosmology.
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Nicholas F. Gier argues that while the Whiteheadian tradition has an elaborate aesthetic cosmology, the Confucian aesthetic understanding of virtue can contribute to the relatively slow development of process ethics (Gier 2004, p. 173).
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See also Analects 16.13.
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As discussed above, the beauty of experience within an individual and amongst individuals are intertwined for Confucius and Whitehead.
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Mencius asserts: “Only the sage can give his body complete fulfillment” (Mencius 7A. 38).
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See also Analects 3.23, 8.8.
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Thus, Hall and Ames argue that, in classical Confucianism, music “seeks to foster an attunement of the unique foci to the constitutive harmonies of the total field,” and thus the goal of musical education is “the compresent, ‘constatic’ experience of realizing a harmony in the interfusion of focus with field, and the attendant enjoyment of this achievement” (Hall and Ames 1987, p. 281).
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Kim, JY. (2017). On Beauty and the Repositioning of Ethics as Aesthetics: Engaging Confucius and Whitehead. In: Yao, X. (eds) Reconceptualizing Confucian Philosophy in the 21st Century. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4000-9_31
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