Early Chinese Thought, Moral Psychology and Modern Science
Edward Slingerland
Professor of Asian Studies
Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition
University of British Columbia
Department of Philosophy
RenminDaxue
June 2-5, 2015
14:00-17:00
The series of lectures will explore early Chinese ethical thought and moral psychology
within the context of the current best knowledge of the human embodied mind coming
out of the cognitive and evolutionary sciences.
June 2: Lecture 1, “Moral Spontaneity, Trust and the Paradox of Virtue”
Many early Chinese thinkers had as their spiritual ideal the state of wu-wei, or effortless
action. By advocating spontaneity as an explicit moral and religious goal, they inevitably
involved themselves in the paradox of wu-wei—the problem of how one can try not to
try—which later became one of the central tensions in East Asian religious thought. In
this talk, I will look at the paradox from both an early Chinese and a contemporary
perspective, drawing upon work in social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and
evolutionary theory to argue that this paradox is a real one, and is moreover intimately
tied up with problems surrounding cooperation in large-scale societies and concerns
about moral hypocrisy.
Suggested Background Readings:
Slingerland, Edward. (2008). The Problem of Moral Spontaneity in the Guodian
Corpus. Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 7(3), 237-256.
Slingerland, Edward. (2014). Trying Not To Try: Ancient China, Modern Science
and the Power of Spontaneity. New York: Crown Publishing. (Introduction and
Chapter 7)
June 3: Lecture 2, “The Moral Mind: Metaphor and Meaning in Early China”
Western scholarship on early Chinese thought has been dominated by two attitudes
toward the role of metaphor in early Chinese thought. One has been to ignore the
foundational role of metaphor and analogy in early Chinese texts, seeing metaphor-based
arguments as reducible to propositional—and therefore properly philosophical—
statements. Another has been to see metaphor and analogy as uniquely Chinese modes of
apprehending the world. According to this view, Western philosophy since the time of
ancient Greece has been literal, analytic, logical and dualistic; Chinese thought, in
contrast, is portrayed as “holistic,” uniquely image-based, and therefore not properly
“philosophical.” In this talk I argue that both of these views of the role of metaphor in
early China are mistaken, and have in fact served to distort our view of early Chinese
thinkers. Although metaphor and analogy do indeed play a foundational, irreducible role
in early Chinese philosophical rhetoric, this dependence of image-schematic concepts is
by no means a unique feature of “the East.” Drawing on a large body of empirical work
from a variety of fields in the cognitive sciences, I will attempt to demonstrate that all
human cognition is heavily dependent on imagistic conceptual structures and crossdomain projections. What is unusual about early Chinese thought was the conscious
attention that thinkers devoted to developing vivid and consistent sets of interlocking
metaphors and metaphorical blends, which makes metaphor and blend analysis a
particularly crucial tool when approaching these texts. I will conclude by reviewing an
encouraging recent trend in the study of Chinese thought where, explicitly or not,
scholars from a variety of backgrounds have begun to take metaphor more seriously as a
foundational bearer of philosophical meaning in early China.
Suggested Background Readings:
Slingerland, Edward G. (2005). Conceptual blending, somatic marking, and
normativity: a case example from ancient Chinese. Cognitive Linguistics, 16(3),
557-584.
Slingerland, Edward. (2011). Metaphor and Meaning in Early China. Dao, 10(1),
1-30
June 4: Lecture 3, “Confucian Moral Psychology and Cognitive Science”
In this talk I will argue that recent work in cognitive science and social psychology
suggests that the sort of “cognitive control” that plays a central role in modern
deontology and utilitarianism is actually a very weak foundation upon which to build an
ethical education system. Human rationality is, in fact, not particular dependable in dayto-day situations, which means that a style of ethics that focuses on habits and automatic
emotions, rather than reasoning styles, might be expected to do a better job of getting
people to reliably act in an ethical manner. I will argue that the early Confucian emphasis
on moral spontaneity, moral emotions, and the inculcation of virtuous habits is based
upon a much more empirically defensible model of human cognition, portraying early
Confucian virtue ethics as involving a kind of “time-delayed cognitive control.” Virtue
ethics involves a system of ethical training that acknowledges (explicitly or not) the
limitations of individual, in-the-moment cognitive control, and therefore designs a system
of training regimes and ethical guidelines—themselves the products of cognitive
control—which are to be internalized and automatized. Virtue ethics might this be seen as
a clever way of getting around the limits of human cognitive control abilities, embedding
higher-level desires and goals in lower-level emotional and sensory-motor systems.
Suggested Background Readings:
Slingerland, Edward. (2011). 'Of what use are the Odes?' Cognitive Science,
Virtue Ethics, and Early Confucian Ethics Philosophy East & West, 61(1), 80109.
June 5: Lecture 4, “Confucian Virtue Ethics and the Situationist Critique”
Virtue ethics has recently been mooted as a potentially more psychologically realistic,
and therefore empirically plausible, model of ethics than the currently-dominant
deontological and consequentialist models. Its claim to psychological plausibility,
however, has been challenged by the situationist critique, which argues that the very
notion of character traits or virtues is empirically indefensible. This talk will review
evidence suggesting that strong versions of the situationist critique of virtue ethics are
empirically and conceptually unfounded, and will further argue that, even if one accepts
that the predictive power of character may be limited, this is not a fatal problem for early
Confucian virtue ethics. Early Confucianism has explicit strategies for strengthening and
expanding character traits over time, as well as for managing a variety of situational
forces. The talk concludes by suggesting that Confucian virtue ethics represents a more
empirically responsible model of ethics than those currently dominant in Western
philosophy.
Suggested Background Readings:
Slingerland, Edward. (2011). The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian
Virtue Ethics.Ethics, 121(2), 390-419.