MCLC: ancient Chinese philosophy on the rise

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: ancient Chinese philosophy on the rise
***********************************************************

Source: The Atlantic (10/8/13):
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/why-are-hundreds-of-ha
rvard-students-studying-ancient-chinese-philosophy/280356/

Why Are Hundreds of Harvard Students Studying Ancient Chinese Philosophy?
The professor who teaches Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory
claims, "This course will change your life."
By CHRISTINE GROSS-LOH

Picture a world where human relationships are challenging, narcissism and
self-centeredness are on the rise, and there is disagreement on the best
way for people to live harmoniously together.

It sounds like 21st-century America. But the society that Michael Puett, a
tall, 48-year-old bespectacled professor of Chinese history at Harvard
University, is describing to more than 700 rapt undergraduates is China,
2,500 years ago.

Puett's course Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory has become
the third most popular course at the university. The only classes with
higher enrollment are Intro to Economics and Intro to Computer Science.
The second time Puett offered it, in 2007, so many students crowded into
the assigned room that they were sitting on the stairs and stage and
spilling out into the hallway. Harvard moved the class to Sanders Theater,
the biggest venue on campus.

Why are so many undergraduates spending a semester poring over abstruse
Chinese philosophy by scholars who lived thousands of years ago? For one
thing, the class fulfills one of Harvard's more challenging core
requirements, Ethical Reasoning. It's clear, though, that students are
also lured in by Puett's bold promise: “This course will change your life.”

His students tell me it is true: that Puett uses Chinese philosophy as a
way to give undergraduates concrete, counter-intuitive, and even
revolutionary ideas, which teach them how to live a better life.
Elizabeth Malkin, a student in the course last year, says, “The class
absolutely changed my perspective of myself, my peers, and of the way I
view the world.” Puett puts a fresh spin on the questions that Chinese
scholars grappled with centuries ago. He requires his students to closely
read original texts (in translation) such as Confucius’s Analects, the
Mencius, and the Daodejing and then actively put the teachings into
practice in their daily lives. His lectures use Chinese thought in the
context of contemporary American life to help 18- and 19-year-olds who are
struggling to find their place in the world figure out how to be good
human beings; how to create a good society; how to have a flourishing
life. 

Puett began offering his course to introduce his students not just to a
completely different cultural worldview but also to a different set of
tools. He told me he is seeing more students who are “feeling pushed onto
a very specific path towards very concrete career goals” than he did when
he began teaching nearly 20 years ago.  A recent report
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324069104578527642373232184.
html> shows a steep decline over the last decade in the number of Harvard
students who are choosing to major in the humanities, a trend roughly seen
across the nation’s liberal arts schools. Finance remains the most popular
career for Harvard graduates. Puett sees students who orient all their
courses and even their extracurricular activities towards practical,
predetermined career goals and plans.

Puett tells his students that being calculating and rationally deciding on
plans is precisely the wrong way to make any sort of important life
decision. The Chinese philosophers they are reading would say that this
strategy makes it harder to remain open to other possibilities that don’t
fit into that plan. Students who do this “are not paying enough attention
to the daily things that actually invigorate and inspire them, out of
which could come a really fulfilling, exciting life,” he explains. If what
excites a student is not the same as what he has decided is best for him,
he becomes trapped on a misguided path, slated to begin an unfulfilling
career. Puett aims to open his students’ eyes to a different way to
approach everything from relationships to career decisions. He teaches
them that:  

The smallest actions have the most profound ramifications.

Confucius, Mencius, and other Chinese philosophers taught that the most
mundane actions can have a ripple effect, and Puett urges his students to
become more self-aware, to notice how even the most quotidian acts—holding
open the door for someone, smiling at the grocery clerk—change the course
of the day by affecting how we feel.

That rush of good feeling that comes after a daily run, the inspiring
conversation with a good friend, or the momentary flash of anger that
arises when someone cuts in front of us in line—what could they have to do
with big life matters? Everything, actually. From a Chinese philosophical
point of view, these small daily experiences provide us endless
opportunities to understand ourselves. When we notice and understand what
makes us tick, react, feel joyful or angry, we develop a better sense of
who we are that helps us when approaching new situations. Mencius, a late
Confucian thinker (4th century B.C.E.), taught that if you cultivate your
better nature in these small ways, you can become an extraordinary person
with an incredible influence, altering your own life as well as that of
those around you, until finally “you can turn the whole world in the palm
of your hand.”

Decisions are made from the heart.

Americans tend to believe that humans are rational creatures who make
decisions logically, using our brains. But in Chinese, the word for “mind”
and “heart” are the same. Puett teaches that the heart and the mind are
inextricably linked, and that one does not exist without the other.
Whenever we make decisions, from the prosaic to the profound (what to make
for dinner; which courses to take next semester; what career path to
follow; whom to marry), we will make better ones when we intuit how to
integrate heart and mind and let our rational and emotional sides blend
into one.  Zhuangzi, a Daoist philosopher, taught that we should train
ourselves to become “spontaneous” through daily living, rather than
closing ourselves off through what we think of as rational
decision-making. In the same way that one deliberately practices the piano
in order to eventually play it effortlessly, through our everyday
activities we train ourselves to become more open to experiences and
phenomena so that eventually the right responses and decisions come
spontaneously, without angst, from the heart-mind.

Recent research into neuroscience is confirming that the Chinese
philosophers are correct: Brain scans reveal that our unconscious
awareness of emotions and phenomena around us are actually what drive the
decisions we believe we are making with such logical rationality.
According to Marianne LaFrance, a psychology professor at Yale, if we see
a happy face for just a fraction of a second (4 milliseconds to be exact),
that’s long enough to elicit a mini emotional high. In one study viewers
who were flashed a smile—even though it was shown too quickly for them to
even realize they had seen it—perceived the things around them more
positively.

If the body leads, the mind will follow.

Behaving kindly (even when you are not feeling kindly), or smiling at
someone (even if you aren’t feeling particularly friendly at the moment)
can cause actual differences in how you end up feeling and behaving, even
ultimately changing the outcome of a situation.

While all this might sound like hooey-wooey self-help, much of what Puett
teaches is previously accepted cultural wisdom that has been lost in the
modern age. Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do,” a view shared
by thinkers such as Confucius, who taught that the importance of rituals
lies in how they inculcate a certain sensibility in a person.  In research
published in Psychological Science, social psychologist Amy Cuddy and her
colleagues found that when we take a power stance (stand with our legs
apart, arms thrust out, taking up space), the pose does not only cause
other people to view us as more confident and powerful; it actually causes
a hormonal surge that makes us become more confident.

At the end of each class, Puett challenges his students to put the Chinese
philosophy they have been learning into tangible practice in their
everyday lives. “The Chinese philosophers we read taught that the way to
really change lives for the better is from a very mundane level, changing
the way people experience and respond to the world, so what I try to do is
to hit them at that level. I’m not trying to give my students really big
advice about what to do with their lives. I just want to give them a sense
of what they can do daily to transform how they live.” Their assignments
are small ones: to first observe how they feel when they smile at a
stranger, hold open a door for someone, engage in a hobby. He asks them to
take note of what happens next: how every action, gesture, or word
dramatically affects how others respond to them. Then Puett asks them to
pursue more of the activities that they notice arouse positive, excited
feelings. In their papers and discussion sections students discuss what it
means to live life according to the teachings of these philosophers.

Once they’ve understood themselves better and discovered what they love to
do they can then work to become adept at those activities through ample
practice and self-cultivation. Self-cultivation is related to another
classical Chinese concept: that effort is what counts the most, more than
talent or aptitude. We aren’t limited to our innate talents; we all have
enormous potential to expand our abilities if we cultivate them. You don’t
have to be stuck doing what you happen to be good at; merely pay attention
to what you love and proceed from there. Chinese philosophers taught that
paying attention to small clues “can literally change everything that we
can become as human beings,” says Puett.

To be interconnected, focus on mundane, everyday practices, and understand
that great things begin with the very smallest of acts are radical ideas
for young people living in a society that pressures them to think big and
achieve individual excellence. This might be one reason why, according to
the Chronicle for Higher Education
<http://chronicle.com/article/Dao-Rising-Chinese-Philosophy/141693/>,
interest in Chinese philosophy is taking off around the nation—not just at
Harvard. And it’s a message that’s especially resonating with those
yearning for an alternative to the fast track they have been on all their
lives.

One of Puett’s former students, Adam Mitchell, was a math and science whiz
who went to Harvard intending to major in economics. At Harvard
specifically and in society in general, he told me, “we’re expected to
think of our future in this rational way: to add up the pros and cons and
then make a decision. That leads you down the road of ‘Stick with what
you’re good at’”—a road with little risk but little reward. But after his
introduction to Chinese philosophy during his sophomore year, he realized
this wasn’t the only way to think about the future. Instead, he tried
courses he was drawn to but wasn’t naturally adroit at because he had
learned how much value lies in working hard to become better at what you
love. He became more aware of the way he was affected by those around him,
and how they were affected by his own actions in turn. Mitchell threw
himself into foreign language learning, feels his relationships have
deepened, and is today working towards a master’s degree in regional
studies. He told me, “I can happily say that Professor Puett lived up to
his promise, that the course did in fact change my life.”