Confucian Deep Reading as Educational Practice in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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

Abstract

Aims. This presentation adds to presentation 2 by explaining how Confucian writing and reading practices provide a model for cultivating refined thinking in today’s image saturated world. It aims to offer and justify a mode of learning and expression large language models (LLM) cannot replace.
Background. As Stephan Marche has noted (2022), algorithmic artificial intelligence is often able to create high quality enough student essays difficult to detect as counterfeits. Students are increasingly using Chat GBT (now in its 4+ generation) and other large language models in their classroom work and writing. Marche suggests that educators have yet to appreciate the revolutionary advances in algorithmic AI. Our students are shifting into a world where discursive activity is subsumed in large,machine-generated, image-rich modes of communication.
Students need help in learning how to navigate these images: understanding how they are constructed, their mode of expression, and how individuals - including themselves - react and engage with them. Students also need help understanding what purposes writing might have for them beyond the content or effect on particular audiences. In many cases they may feel like AI can do better on a writing assignment, or at least do it more efficiently than they can do themselves.
The Chinese aesthetic-image-literacy education in the “three great perfections” (三絕) of poetry, calligraphy, and paining provide vital lesson for today; they show how the way one writes is also a way to pay “reverential attention” jing (敬) to oneself, to other persons, and to the world.
Perspectives and Methods. The presentation draws on the historical/philological method for comparing different traditions of self-cultivation developed by Pierre Hadot (2020, 43-53) and further expanded into broad intercultural contexts by Fiordalis et al. (2018). It also utilizes Cassirer’s (1944) method of cultural phenomenology for understanding how cultural activity shapes the ways we are engaged in reality.
Results. The aforementioned kind of writing practice provides crucial lessons for improving student literacy today, something that AI does not and cannot capture. There is a kind of writing that hones our thinking in the doing, where the outcome is the expression of us, not what we can polish for external audiences. Drawing on the work of Richard Shusterman (2022), the presentation demonstrates the relevance of this mode of writing practice for our present situation.

Author

• Eli Orner Kramer, University of Wrocław