The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. He is the recipient of a Harvard College Professorship for excellence in undergraduate teaching and is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science.

Christine Gross-Loh is a journalist and author. Her writing has appeared in publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and The Guardian. She has a PhD from Harvard University in East Asian history.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Path

1

The Age of Complacency

A certain vision of history has become conventional wisdom. Until the nineteenth century, human beings lived in what we call “traditional societies.” In these societies, they were always told what to do. They were born into a preexisting social structure that determined their lives: born peasants, they remained peasants; born aristocrats, they remained aristocrats. The family into which they were born determined how much money and power they had, and so the trajectories of their lives were set from the day of their birth.

The story continues: in nineteenth-century Europe, people finally broke free of these constraints. For the first time, we realized that we are all individuals who can think rationally. We can make decisions for ourselves and take control of our lives. As rational creatures, we can create a world of unprecedented opportunity. With these realizations, the story says, the modern world was born.

But if some of us broke away, other cultures were left behind—or so we believe. To many of us, classical China represents the ultimate traditional society in which people were required to follow rigidly defined social roles in order to live within a stratified, ordered world.

Thus, it must be a world that has nothing to teach us.

Of course, at times this reading of traditional societies in general and China in particular has been given a romanticized spin: We now are alienated from each other, but people in the traditional world saw themselves as living in harmony with the cosmos. We have broken from the natural world and seek to control and dominate it, but people in the traditional world tried to live in accordance with the patterns of nature.

This sentimental view of a traditional world, too, has nothing to teach us. It simply turns these so-called traditional societies into something akin to nostalgia pieces. We can go to a museum and see an Egyptian mummy and think, How interesting. An ancient Chinese artifact? How quaint. Intriguing to look at, but we wouldn’t want to go back to that time—to the world they represent. We wouldn’t want to live there or take any lessons from these traditional worlds, because they weren’t modern. We are the ones who finally figured out things, not them.

But as you are about to learn, many of our stereotypes about these “traditional” societies are wrong. And there is much we can learn from the past.

The danger of our vision of history isn’t just that it has led us to dismiss much of human existence as irrelevant, but also that we think today’s predominant ideas are the only ones that encourage people to determine their own lives; therefore, today’s ideas are the only correct ones.

The fact is that there has been a wide range of visions of how humans can lead lives of their own making. Once we recognize that, we can see the “modern” for what it actually is: one narrative out of many, built from a specific time and place. An entire world of thought thus becomes available to us—one that challenges some of our most cherished myths.

Myth: We Live in an Age of Freedom Unlike Any Other

Most of us think of ourselves as essentially free, in ways that our ancestors were not. After we in the West broke from the traditional world in the nineteenth century, we finally had the ability to decide for ourselves how to organize the world. We spent two centuries grappling with various competing ideologies: socialism, fascism, communism, and democratic capitalism. And once all but one of those ideas was largely discredited, we finally arrived at the “end of history.” With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, neoliberalism seemed to have won out as the one correct way of organizing the world—the one that best enables humans to flourish and prosper.

But what do we make, then, of the unhappiness, narcissism, and anxiety surging in the developed world? We are told that hard work will lead to success, yet the gap between rich and poor has widened dramatically, and social mobility is on the decline. Our lives are mediated by all kinds of fascinating and impressive devices, we have achieved unprecedented medical advances, yet we face environmental and humanitarian crises on a frightening scale. Several decades later, our great optimism has disappeared. We no longer feel as confident as we did in the way we have structured our world.

So how much have we figured out? Will historians look back on this era as one of prosperity, equality, freedom, and happiness? Or will they instead define the early twenty-first century as an age of complacency: a time when people were unhappy and unfulfilled; when they witnessed growing crises but failed to respond, feeling there to be no viable alternatives?

The Chinese philosophical texts described in this book offer alternatives to this Age of Complacency. But they are not coherent ideologies that would, for example, replace democracy. Rather, they are counterintuitive notions about the self and its place in the world. And many of them were actually developed in opposition to the idea of living according to any overarching system of thought.

From roughly 600 to 200 BC, an explosion of philosophical and religious movements throughout Eurasia gave rise to a wide variety of visions for human flourishing. During this period, which has come to be called the Axial Age, many of the ideas that developed in Greece also emerged in China and vice versa. In fact, in China, as we will see, certain beliefs arose that were very similar to those common in the West today. But in China, such views lost the day, while other ideas emerged in opposition, arguing for a very different path to a good life.

None of what we are looking at should be considered “Chinese” views as opposed to “Western” ones, any more than we are dealing with traditional ideas as opposed to modern ones. As we explore these concepts, we will see that not only have people been debating how best to organize the world since long before the modern era but also that there are true alternatives in thinking about how to live well.

Myth: We Know How to Determine the Direction Our Lives Will Take

When it comes to planning for happiness and prosperity in the West, we are taught to rely on our rational minds, confident that we can arrive at a solution by careful calculation. In the face of life’s uncertainty, we take comfort in the belief that by overcoming emotion and bias and reducing our experience to measurable data, we can master chance and defy fate. Consider our most popular approach to moral and ethical dilemmas: inventing a representative hypothetical situation and working through it rationally. In the famous trolley experiment, we’re told to imagine ourselves in a trolley yard, watching a runaway trolley coming down the tracks. We see it’s going to hit five people up on the tracks ahead. But if we pull a switch we can divert the trolley onto a different track, where one person is lying. Do we allow the trolley to plow into those five people, or do we pull the switch to save them—actively choosing to kill the single person lying there?

What’s the right thing to do?

This kind of question has occupied philosophers and ethicists for lifetimes. Countless essays—even a book or two—have been written on its implications. The scenario allows us to reduce decision making to a simple set of data and a single choice. Most of us think that’s how decisions get made.

They tried these thought experiments in classical China, too. But our Chinese thinkers weren’t as intrigued. This is a fine...