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Notes on video lecture:
The Transition to Becoming Sincere
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on February 3, 2016 (go to class or lectures)


Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
anger, Nicomachean, glib, merits, sake, right, finished, try, worthy, carved, sincere, female, desire, transition, compassion, recital, shaming, state, chess, Good, internal, frustrated, rote, music, ritual, prestige, compassionate
anyone who has wu-wei as a spiritual goal is going to face the tension of trying not to
the paradox of wu-wei in the Analects
Analects 3.3: "A man who is not Good, what has he to do with ? A man who is not Good, what has he to do with music?"
ritual and are the way you become good
Confucius is saying: you shouldn't be doing the practice unless you are already
Goodness is cultivated by means of the Confucian practices
it can't be , you can't just be going through the motions
you have to be involved with what you are doing at a certain level
while we may offer candy to a child in order for them to play , to develop a higher skill and interest
virtue seems to be something that we desire for its own
Analects 3.3 says "you shouldn't be messing with ritual unless you are doing it for the reasons"
to become a gentleman, you need to love the Way
you can't be a hypocrite
Confucius is worried about
people being
say the right things but don't practice what you preach
the village honest man
the "village "
goes through the motions but doesn't feel it
you can't point to anything they are doing that is wrong
they do all the rituals property
they know all the odes by heart
they can play music
and yet, they're hollow
the petty "ru"
motivated by salary or
Analects 7.30
"Is Goodness really so far away? If I simply Goodness, I will find that it is already here."
what it is about is motivation
if you really want it, you've got it
Confucius is constantly with people who don't love the way
Analects 9.18: "I have yet to meet a man who loves Virtue as much as he loves beauty."
he is saying that the Way is something that someone should desire as much as sex
Analects 5.10: "Zai Wo was sleeping during the daytime."
"Rotten wood cannot be , and a wall of dung cannot be plastered. As for ai Wo, what would be the use of reprimanding him?"
the metaphor is: his raw material is ruined
someone who has the right material
Yan Hui
as they say in Canada, he is a keener
Analects 6:3
Duke Ai asked, "Who among your disciples might be said to love learning?"
Confucius answered, "There was one named Yan Hui who loved learning. He never misdirected his , and never made the same mistake twice. Unfortunately, his allotted lifespan was short, and he has passed away. Now that he is gone, there are none who really love learning, at least I have yet to hear of one."
Confucius is constantly his students in this way.
Yan Hui was born learning and loved it.
but there is a tension
What do you do if you weren't born loving it?
How do you make someone into a Yan Hui?
if you apply yourself, you will eventually love it
fake it until you make it
you'll start to feel the right things
this applies to basic skills
but how this transition happen when it comes to virtue
as opposed to a craft skill
how do you become suddenly
the lurking danger in the background is that you won't make the
you become a village honest person, one of these counterfeit people
how is acquiring virtue different from acquiring a skill
learning to play chess
carving and polishing a beautiful object
there's an important disanalogy between acquiring virtue and skills
recognized by Aristotle
Ethics
the disanalogy between crafts and virtues
the products of a craft determine by their own character whether they have been produced well, and so it suffices that they are in the right when they have been produced
so a bowl is a good bowl when it is
but for actions expressing virtue to be done temperately or justly, and hence well, it does not suffice that they are themselves in the right state, rather the agent must also be in the right state when he does them
if you go to a piano , it's beautiful, then you find out afterwards that they were actually thinking about what they were going to have for dinner, or they were counting seats and seeing how much money they were going to make
they produced something and that produce stands on its own
there was a viral picture of a policeman putting boots on a homeless man in winter
implicit is the idea that this is motivated by the right motivation
if we found out later it was a public relations stunt, everything would change
it would not be a act anymore
this is why it is not necessarily the case that if you are not compassionate, just by working in a soup kitchen you will compassionate, since something inside has to change, not just that your skills improve
in the end, Confucius sees little other way for those who don't feel sincerity to be sincere but to practice sincere acts
if you act out compassionate behavior in a ritual way, you will become
but the danger is you will just become someone who simply acts compassionate, a kind of hypocrite