Metaphor is not just a poetic or literary device that serves to express what we are already thinking, but shapes what we think things are like, how they function, and what their relationships are to other things in the world.  Use of this method is especially vivid and sustained in the Chinese tradition, but it is fundamental to human thought. A literally false identification of two things is a metaphor if it invokes a comparison between them that is meant to identify or highlight a shared characteristic. An analogy, on the other hand, proposes or explores an inference about a thing or explains what it is like through its sharing a characteristic with another thing.  We can use metaphors to present analogies. To say that we use what is near to know the far (Analects 6.30) is revealing of the nature of analogy as an explanatory method: it is using what is most familiar to shed light on what is not familiar. It often proceeds from the concrete or that of which one has direct experience, such as one’s body and actions in the world, one’s own emotions and desires and aims, to that of others. Call what is familiar, its various characteristics and relationships, the “source domain.” Call the domain to be illuminated the “target domain.” Ways of understanding the target domain may get formulated as metaphors such as plant growth from the source domain. This is the most basic model of how metaphor and analogy are used.

In this lecture I begin to make the case that the use of metaphor and analogy is more complex, dynamic, and productive, even within the Chinese tradition, than it has commonly been recognized to be. For one thing, the direction of analogy is often two-way rather than one-way.  Applying metaphors derived from the source to the target might raise questions, problems and directions for further development of the understanding that may prompt us to go back to the source domain and revise or reconstrue our understanding of the relevant metaphors, or we may be moved to search for other metaphors in the source domain to cover gaps in understanding we encounter. The metaphors used in analogies are often polysemous, malleable and indeterminate in meaning, such that their precise ways of resonating with the target domain provide room for adjustment and further specification and revision as we discover limitations or complexities in the ways we have previously deployed them.

If one implication we have drawn from a metaphor to characterize the target turns out not to be accurate or productive, it may be possible to find another implication in the source domain that better fits, and this in turn amplifies our understanding of the source domain. In effect, it is possible for the source and target domains to alternately switch places as a result of our inquiry into what makes the most sense of the phenomena to be explained or conceptually ordered. What we come to learn about the target domain as a result of analogical inference from the source domain may serve as impetus to investigate and further our understanding of the source domain. What we thought was familiar enough may through our use of it become puzzling or in need of further investigation. This more complex use of metaphor and analogy, I shall argue, can be well integrated with more literal and empirical inquiry, which amplifies its explanatory power.

      I begin discussion of this method with reference to the metaphor of plant growth for moral development, illustrating how it gives rise to back-and-forth movement between the source and target domains. I discuss how this movement can now be integrated with a considerable body of studies and higher-level scientific theory that accords with the Mèngzǐan idea that there are inborn dispositions that underlie other-directed concern. I then proceed to discuss how, in early Confucian texts such as the Mèngzǐ (孟子) and Xúnzǐ 荀子, metaphors derived from thinking of the way that society and state should be organized are used to think about the way a person or body should be organized, and the other way around. In Lecture 1 I discuss these metaphors as they appear in the Mèngzǐ, and in Lecture 2, in the Xúnzǐ.

Mèngzǐ envisions a hierarchical relationship between the heart-mind and the body, but as is well-acknowledged, Xúnzǐ differs from Mèngzǐ in how he envisions hierarchy. This difference is signified by Mèngzǐ’s use of the plant metaphor for moral cultivation as opposed to Xúnzǐ’s use of the craft metaphor. In this lecture I want to explain why the comparison between their theories is more complicated than the difference between growing and crafting, and that is partly because Xúnzǐ employs metaphors and analogies other than crafting.  In the course of this explanation, I will further develop some of my previous work on Xúnzǐ’s theory of moral cultivation. I then proceed to discuss how Xúnzǐ conceives the relation between the king, the people, and his ministers.

      Xúnzǐ’s theory anticipates the role of culture in transforming our biologically-based dispositions, culminating in the assertion that human flourishing lies in just such a transformation. His theory comes much more clearly into focus when we consider the array of metaphors and analogies he uses in addition to the craft metaphor. These include analogies to the leader guiding the people through embodying the parent in the parent-child relationship, and the metaphor of nurture applied to desires and dispositions. Considering their role in Xúnzǐ’s theory helps to correct the impression of a craftsman who makes a fine artifact through a sheer overcoming of the material through relentless will. Xúnzǐ does emphasize the necessity for unceasing accumulated effort, but it is effort guided by a sense for the structure and contours of the material to be crafted, so as to bring out the best in it. Again, bringing in contemporary empirical and scientific inquiry, I argue that a synthesis of Mèngzǐ’s and Xúnzǐ’s theories of moral development gives in broad outline the most plausible theory of moral development we have to date.

In this lecture I discuss musical and culinary metaphors of harmony that have an aesthetic dimension. Early Confucian thinkers use them to conceptualize and articulate an ideal of harmony that I want to further specify. My specification goes well beyond what they proposed, but I believe it is broadly within the bounds of what they did say about it. It is a conception of harmony, I believe, for our time that is in a Confucian spirit. It incorporates acceptance of disagreement and contest, and in this regard, I also bring in the metaphor of archery that appears in the Analects. To discuss how disagreement may be part of harmony without destroying it, I introduce the notion of accommodation as a value.

To discuss the way that contest may, counter to first appearances, become an integral element of harmony, I bring the Chinese notion of harmony, hé, into dialogue with the Greek notion of contest, agon. I will go on to discuss the way that the articulation of the harmony ideal appeals to a kind of motivation that contemporary Western philosophy has forgotten about, and that is to our sense of moral beauty. To further articulate the relevant notion of beauty, I bring Xúnzǐ’s notion of beauty, měi, into dialogue with Aristotle’s notion of the fine, the noble, and the beautiful, to kalon. The feeling for beauty plays an important role in the power of music and ritual to help us accomplish moral cultivation, and I will discuss what relevance ritual has not only to contemporary moral cultivation but also to governance.

I discuss the Neo-Confucian metaphor of being one body with all other things, and focus on one dimension of that metaphor, which is our interdependence with all things. I argue that this is an important rationale for the ideal of harmony and in particular the dimensions of accommodation and contest for which I have argued in the previous lecture. At the same time, I argue that a realistic view of the extent to which one can analogize from what is true of one-body organisms (such as individual human beings) to larger social bodies containing such organisms will lead us to differentiate degrees and kinds of interdependency.

I will also take from the Neo-Confucians, and Zhū Xī in particular, the emphasis on zhōng, which I understand as “doing one’s best in serving others, and shù, which I understand as “sympathetic understanding.” For Zhū Xī, shù is a crucial method for realizing the virtue of rén. Though this method became de-emphasized in the classical era after Confucius and only partially given renewed attention in the Neo-Confucian era, I propose a renewal of contemporary attention to it, especially in connection to extending the unmediated and intimate response to the suffering of one’s child, as if it were one’s own suffering, to the suffering of those outside the family. One idea from the Analects that did continue to receive great emphasis going forward, especially in the Mèngzǐ, is that the path to developing rén must go through extending the caring between family members to others outside the family. At the same time, it seems to me that one of the greatest weaknesses in the impressive body of writings of Confucians on moral cultivation is precisely the failure to specify practical educational and ritual practices that could accomplish this extension of care beyond the family. The path to finding new practices to accomplish this kind of extension, I shall argue, is to be found in practices that promote zhòng and shù more effectively when applied to relationships with others outside the family.

This method is also applied to better understanding of why others disagree with us, and I discuss rituals of protest as channels for communication from others who feel that they must contest with us. Since the conception of harmony in the one body articulated in these lectures goes considerably beyond anything that can be found in the Chinese literature, I draw attention to the internal diversity and fluidity of great traditions of thought as embodied in their texts, each text containing within itself and in relation to each other more than one viable set of coherent meanings.  These meanings are eligible for fusion with meanings from other texts. Each set of meanings represent somewhat different directions of development for the tradition. Some emerge as dominant, but others may later receive renewed attention because the problems of the times prompt attention to them. Confucianism shows itself to be a living and still-viable tradition to the extent that its interpreters draw from the different possible lines of development with an eye toward their applicability to their own current situation.

I apply this conception of tradition not only to the articulation of a conception of harmony in the one body, but to the need to articulate a new basis for the human interdependency with the natural world. We cannot rely on any pre-existing Pattern for the articulation of the kind of interdependency we need, I argue. We must enhance and promote the kind of interdependency that will enable us to save ourselves and the planet.

Confucian and Daoist approaches to the social and natural worlds are not just competing, but deeply complementary. Each responds to grave flaws in the other. I take up a characteristic criticism of Confucians to be found in the Daoist texts, which is that the project of achieving virtue easily degenerates into a striving for superiority over others that not only perverts the aim of self-cultivation but defeats the equally important aim of helping others to improve.

Underlying this critique is a rejection of the Confucian made-up heart-mind as the ruler of the person/body. The Zhuāngzǐ presents an alternative: a pluralistic and egalitarian conception holding that there is a wisdom to be found in the qì of a person’s body that cannot be found in the heart-mind. I discuss how this conception is rooted in a view of our relation to the world that asserts both our oneness with interdependent, fluidly interacting things that are never permanent but flow into and become each other. Our relationship to the world is such that there are endless alternative ways we can conceptualize it. The complexity and fluid plasticity of things is part of what makes the range of alternative conceptualizations of the world significant and wide.  This way in which all things are one carries with it the expectation that it will be elusive and resistant to adequate capture through our conceptualizations. I relate this view of our relation to the world with a contemporary and compelling scientific view of human perception as a kind of surfing waves of sensory stimulation. One may think that this results in a pessimistic skepticism, but I argue that the result is constructive in pointing out what we have missed and might yet better comprehend about the world.

The Daoist texts do not provide a very useful picture of political and social governance, so I shall try to delineate what a Daoist-inspired picture would look like. I suggest that analogy from the pluralistic and egalitarian conception of organization within the person should have democratic elements in political governance, and discuss what those elements might look like in combination with the Confucian conception of political and social governance that I have sketched in the previous lectures.