“Next to” and “among” bugs: A Confucian perspective on Yingchun Zhu’s philosophy and pedagogies of otherness for peaceful co-habitation

• In Event: When Beings Encounter: The Multiplicities of Peace

Proposal

This study examines Yingchun Zhu’s innovative pedagogy as a transformative model for peace education through the lens of Confucian philosophy. Zhu, a Chinese educator-artist, invites students not only to immerse themselves in stories detailing his unique encounters with bugs, but also to learn to read, to write, to sing, and to live next to and among bugs. Zhu’s approach fosters continuous self-reconstruction through encounters with the often disdained, feared, and exterminated Other – bugs. By engaging with these marginalized beings, students cultivate the ethical dispositions necessary for peaceful cohabitation in nature-culture: sympathy, empathy, humility, and responsibility. This study interprets Zhu’s approach as grounded in the Confucian principle of 和而不同 (hé ér bù tóng, harmony in diversity), showing its reconfiguration of “peace” through Confusion reimagining of otherness.
The theoretical scaffolding bridges Zhu’s relational methodologies, notably his pedagogical concepts of “next to” and “among,” with core Confucian concepts: 诚 (chéng, ritual integrity), 礼 (lǐ, ritual), 恕 (shù, reciprocity), 仁 (rén, humaneness), and 格物致知 (géwù zhìzhī, investigating things to extend knowledge). This framework also dialogues with Western phenomenology (Levinas’s ethics of alterity (Levinas, 1961)) and postcolonial theory (Spivak’s subaltern critique (Spivak, 1988)).
This study employs a theory-building case study (Stake, 1995) of Zhu’s (2019, 2020a; 2020b; 2024) pedagogy, analyzing his “next to-among” methods to theorize Confucian-informed peace education while critiquing Eurocentric humanism. Through Confucian hermeneutics, it triangulates Zhu’s bug-human-encounter narratives, pedagogical reflections, and sonic/visual archives of bugs’ life, yielding three interventions: (1) replacing Western Othering with Confucian co-becoming, (2) reconfiguring power via paradoxical (ir)representability of bugs (Spivak + 仁rén), and (3) recasting bugs’ life traces as pedagogical texts (Levinas + 格物致知géwù zhìzhī).
Zhu’s pedagogy operationalizes the Confucian ideal of 和而不同 (hé ér bù tóng) as both an ontological stance and practical methods for peaceful coexistence. Three key findings reveal: (1) Selfhood emerges “among” (Zhu, 2024) others: the 诚 (chéng, integrity) of selfhood requires perpetual 礼(lǐ, ritual) engagement with others-as-mirrors; (2) An ethical self-positioning is “next to” (Zhu, 2020a) others: Confucian 恕 (shù, reciprocity) and 仁 (rén, humaneness) require sharing marginalized others’ ontological paradox – irrepresentable yet represented, silent yet spoken-for – thereby challenging colonial logics that vacillate between paternalistic salvation and violent eradication (Spivak, 1988); (3) Emergent and embodied experience proves essential for understanding self-other entanglements: Zhu’s application of 格物致知 (géwù zhìzhī) through non-institutional knowledge attunes students to Levinasian (1961) “faces” in miniature, disrupting knowledge hierarchies that sustain Othering. This study embodies an epistemic 和而不同(hé ér bù tóng), bridging Eastern and Western thought without assimilation or erasure. By operationalizing Confucian principles as active analytical tools, it advances decolonial cultural communication. Simultaneously, it extends the posthuman/post-qualitative turn, showing how ancient relational ontologies (e.g., 仁 rén as more-than-human ethics) can reframe contemporary crises beyond anthropocentric paradigms.

Author

• Liang Wang, The University of Wisconsin-Madison