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Handling Fate: the Ru Discourse on Ming 命

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Handling Fate: the Ru Discourse on Ming 命 Handling Fate: The Ru Discourse on Ming 命 By Youngsun Back A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (East Asian Languages & Literature) at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 2013 Date of final oral examination: 5/13/2013 The dissertation is approved by the following member of the Final Oral Committee: Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Professor, East Asian Languages & Cultures, UC Berkeley Mark Meulenbeld, Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages & Literature Byung-Jin Lim, Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages & Literature Se-Mi Oh, Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages & Literature Donald R Davis, Associate Professor, Languages & Cultures of Asia Philip J. Ivanhoe, Professor, East Asian & Comparative Philosophy & Religion, City University of Hong Kong © Copyright by Youngsun Back 2013 All Right Reserved i Dedicated to all the sages and thinkers mentioned in this study ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First of all, I wish to thank my advisor, Mark Csikszentmihalyi. He guided me to this mysterious issue of ming 命, fate, and he also laid the foundation for this study. During the course of writing this dissertation, I often felt I am on the palm of his hand. And, I truly appreciate Philip Ivanhoe, Mark’s teacher and who also became my own teacher. His intellectual acumen and insight as well as his endless encouragement always amaze me. He is also the one who suggested this fabulous title, Handling Fate. These two people are my true teachers. Without them, I would never have been able to complete this study. I would like to express my gratitude to my committee members, Mark Meulenbeld, B. J. Lim, Se-Mi Oh, and Donald Davis, for reading my dissertation and giving me insightful comments. I am also grateful to Taik Kim, who introduced me to Tasan’s thought as well as various philosophical issues. I thank as well my classmates at University of Wisconsin- Madison. Particularly, Yongyun always stands by me and helps me along the way. My heartfelt thanks must go to Guo Jue. An email she sent after she graduated always cheers me up whenever I am dispirited. And also thanks to Teresa Nealon and Cynthia Koerber in Dept. of East Asian Languages and Literature. I would like to add special thanks to Justin Tiwald at San Francisco State University, Kim Sungmoon and Eirik Harris at City University of Hong Kong, and Park Dajin at Korea University. I don’t know whether it is a proper object for expressing my gratitude. Nevertheless, I would like to thank a group of books, Darrin McMahon’s Happiness, Julia Annas’s The Morality of Happiness Mark Csikszentmihalyi’s Material Virtue, Margaret Osler’s Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy, and Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness. Actually, these books are written by prominent authors, but at a certain point, they seem to me like a living creature of its own. Whenever I read them, I am always struck by something new that inspires me. Above all, I am grateful to my parents, Baek Joonhuem and Jun Kyongok, whose earnest wish and prayer have helped me come this far, and also my sister, Suhyun. Finally, I want to express deep gratitude and love to Deokwoo, the treasure of my life, who I knew would become my dear husband. We both had a premonition. Isn’t this our ming? iii HANDLING FATE: THE RU DISCOURSE ON MING 命 Youngsun Back This is a study of the Ru notion of ming 命, conventionally translated into English as fate. In my thesis, I argue that the notion of ming is tied to a particular way of understanding the world and to the question of whether the world operates according to a moral order or the world is a contingent place. The discourse of ming, in other words, is about the way Ru thinkers came to terms with contingency, i.e., how they handled fate. To that end, the study performs a historical reconstruction of ming discourse at several pivotal points in its development. In the first part, I trace the development of ming discourse in early China, from Kongzi 孔子, Mozi 墨子, Mengzi 孟子, and to Xunzi 荀子. My goal is to examine how internal and external criticisms of Ru teaching gave rise to two different conceptualizations of ming. Briefly, one side, typified by Kongzi, maintained that the world is a contingent place, beyond human control and comprehension. The other side, whose representative figure is Xunzi, maintained that the world necessarily follows a moral order. In the second part, I investigate how these two conflicting conceptualizations of ming re-emerged in later Ru history, when Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200) in Song China was confronted with Buddhism and Chŏng Yagyong 丁若鏞 (1762-1836) in late Chosŏn Korea faced challenges from Catholicism. Partly as reactions against or in response to these powerful foreign religions, they established new versions of ming discourse, significantly different from those of their predecessors. This historical contextualization and philosophical analysis of the discourse on ming explores a set of issues that have not received enough attention: e.g., the role of virtue and the status of external goods in human life, the different formulations of self-cultivation programs and different conceptualizations of a good human life. Furthermore, this study questions the common assumption that the Ru tradition is primarily a single system of ethical philosophy that is unified, consistent, and coherent throughout history. This study illuminates the diverse and multiple trends of thought found within the Ru tradition, and explores how they actively responded to their own problems and dynamically interacted with each other throughout history and across different cultural contexts. One of the significant approaches of this study is to take historically and regionally diverse Ru thinkers as equal participants in a conversation on the same subject, using a similar language. In addition, this study will also put us in a better position to compare the Ru tradition with other traditions, because the subject of fate is shared by other cultures, including modern cultures of our own time. The study of ming and fate will serve as a clear starting point for comparison. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ii ABSTRACT iii INTRODUCTION: THE RU DISCOURSE ON MING 1 PART ONE: BACKGROUND OF THE RU DISCOURSE ON MING 42 1. The Doctrine of Tianming 天命 45 1.1 The Doctrine of Tianming in the Book of Documents 48 1.2 The Doctrine of Tianming in the Book of Poetry 63 2. Tianming and Ming in the Lunyu 71 3. Mozi’s Reconstruction of Moral Economy 90 4. Mengzi’s Rationalization of Moral Economy 125 5. Xunzi’s Moral Economy of Li 禮 155 6. Shun’s 舜 Ascension to the Throne 181 PART TWO: ZHU XI AND TASAN 208 7. Zhu Xi’s Moral Economy of Li 理 210 7.1 Zhu Xi’s Ethical System of Li and Qi 213 7.2 Zhu Xi’s Moral Economy of Li 220 8. Tasan’s Moral Economy of Sangje 上帝 244 8.1 Tasan’s Deconstruction of Zhu Xi’s Ethical System of Li and Qi 249 8.2 Tasan’s Moral Economy of Sangje 270 9. Zhu Xi and Tasan 294 9.1 Zhu Xi’s Notion of tianming 天命, liming 立命, and zhengming 正命 295 9.2 Tasan’s Notion of tianming 天命, liming 立命, and zhengming 正命 301 9.3 Zhu Xi vs. Tasan on Good Life 306 CONCLUSION: HANDLING FATE AND THE GOOD HUMAN LIFE 315 BIBLIOGRAPHY 324 1 ■ INTRODUCTION: THE RU DISCOURSE ON MING Several days after Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic on 1 June 2009, a number of personal stories connected with that terrible accident started to appear in newspapers. One story concerned an Italian couple, Johanna and Kurt Ganthaler, who missed the doomed plane, only to end up in a car accident in Austria about a week later. Mrs. Ganthaler died; her husband was seriously injured. Their fortunate earlier escape seemed to make the story of this couple even more tragic than other stories about those who lost their lives on Flight 447. Their story provokes a sense of fear and dread rather than mere sympathy; it is not so much tragic as frightening. It is frightening because it gives the impression that there is absolutely nothing they could have done to avoid such a terrible fate. The story of the Ganthalers highlights and intensifies our sense of the futility of human agency by combining and contrasting the notions of fortune or luck on the one hand and fate or destiny on the other. This couple narrowly missed being passengers aboard Flight 447: they enjoyed remarkable good fortune. But, they escaped only to suffer a different, terrible accident: such was their fate. These accounts of fortune and fate are grounded in two conflicting features of the world: contingency and necessity. Fortune and luck are the names given to contingency, describing that an event may or may not happen by chance. Fate and destiny involve necessity, the notion that what happens must happen. Despite this apparent difference, the accounts of fortune and fate actually point to a shared truth about the world: that certain events are beyond human control. In his footnote, Darrin McMahon rightly notes: Strictly speaking, luck and fate are opposed, in that one implies randomness and the other preestablished order. When considered from the standpoint of human 2 happiness, however, the two are closely related, in that each denies the role of human agency in determining the course of human events. Whether the universe is predetermined or unfolds chaotically, what happens to us – our happiness – is out of our hands.1 This Italian couple definitely did not plan to be late for their flight, nor did they intend to swerve into the path of an oncoming truck.
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