A Humanistic Pedagogy of Reading in Confucian Tradition: for the Recovery of Spiritual Connection to the Self

• In Event: Thinking Pedagogies in China: Experiments, Constraints, and New Directions Prompted by Chinese Philosophy

Abstract

Objectives. This presentation aims at showing how the ancient humanistic pedagogy of reading in Confucian tradition can be recovered for modern classrooms. Reading as an ethical practice has its origins in the ancient humanistic traditions, both East and West. In both,‘reading’ was considered critical to the pedagogy of forming students’ selfhood. However, ‘reading’ in modern schooling has lost this spiritual connection due to the modernist shift to ‘writing’ as the main pedagogical tool. What is called essay-writing is a pedagogical and academic tool commonly used to judge students’ mastery and comprehension, emphasizing the factual and the logical rather than the literary, with the use of the first person singular discouraged. Thus, reading is cast adrift from the reader’s personality, intentionality and sensibility. This paper develops a new pedagogy of reading that can counter this modernist tendency.
Perspective(s). With a comparative perspective, this paper contributes to enriching vocabularies to describe the intrinsic value of the humanities education. In this reconstruction, I start with Zhu Xi’s new ideas of (humanistic) learning, as he conceives his ethics of reading as the actual way of realizing his ethics of learning. My underlying concern in this presentation is to see whether Zhu Xi’s ethics of reading can be newly interpreted as the practice of self-reading, which may allow us to formulate his old idea of self-cultivation in quest for the Way (tao, 道) in new terms: self-cultivation as self-dispossession in favor of the text, or as self-dialogue with the mediating practice of textuality. This task is critically addresses the question: “In reading the classical texts in Confucian tradition, how are we supposed to make a leap from reading the concrete lives of sages to the discovery of abstract and universal moral principles(li, 理).
Methods. This is a philosophy paper focused on textual interpretation and reconstruction to justify its assertions.
Data sources. I reconstruct Zhu Xi’s ethics of reading by drawing primarily upon the original text of Zhu Xi’s method of reading (tu-shu fa, 讀書法) from the Conversations of Master Chu, Arranged Topically (朱子語類選集).
Results. By showing the paradoxical nature of the text, this presentation shows that the reader’s experience of, the text in Zhu Xi’s ethics of reading can be characterized as aesthetic as well as moral. Thus, the text can be taken as if it were a work of art which has its own status of being as a symbol of indefinable yet absolute value, i.e., principle, the meaning of which the readers are supposed to absorb to make principle part of themselves.
Significance..In this presentation, I reconstruct a 12th century neo-Confucian scholar Zhu Xi’s ethics of reading to show how it provides h a new possibility of recovering the old practice of reading as a self-(trans)formative event- a way of reconnecting ourselves to the old tradition, to accommodate the post-metaphysical culture of contemporary liberal education.

Author

• Duck-Joo Kwak, Seoul National University