Abstract
This chapter discusses aspects of the work of Tu Weiming in relation to the idea of a liberal education. It does this in the context of broader questions about the nature, problems, and possibilities of comparative philosophy. Dialogue emerges in Tu’s work both as a substantive topic and as integral to aspects of his approach to philosophy and to his commitment to the dissemination of Confucian thought. In spite of Tu’s obvious success in many respects, some problems with this engagement with and in dialogue are identified, and these in turn are related to his treatment of questions of language and translation – in particular to his somewhat negative attitude to philosophy’s linguistic turn. The comparison of Confucian approaches with the idea of a liberal education enables reconsideration of ideas that are central to education, and in so doing the discussion demonstrates the value of comparative approaches in the study of education.
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Notes
- 1.
For a compelling discussion, see Shoko Suzuki (2007).
- 2.
Available at: https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/events/confucianism-and-liberal-education-for-a-global-era. Accessed: 4 December 2019.
- 3.
In the context of this focus on dialogue, it is interesting to recall the opera Nixon in China. This somewhat surreal and eerie work was commissioned in 1987 by the director Peter Sellars, with a libretto by Alice Goodman and music by John Adams.
- 4.
For further discussion, see Tu (1989), especially pp. 77–79.
- 5.
I have in mind the work of R.M. Hare and J.L. Mackie, as well as the theories of moral development of Lawrence Kohlberg.
- 6.
A close cousin of the glossary approach is the systematic Wikipedia-style listing of key concepts, useful for the newcomer but potentially misleading.
- 7.
An example of this would be Tu’s appeal in the Georgetown lecture to the notion of autonomy (alongside dignity) as central to education, a concept that, for all of its extensive analysis in Anglophone philosophy, is left here unexplained.
- 8.
See, for example, the recent publication of Derrida’s Geschlecht III (2019) as well as my own discussion of Pierre Joris’ extraordinary reflections on his own experience of translating Paul Celan (Standish 2017). In something other than a poststructuralist vein, and prompted partly by his reading of Thoreau, Stanley Cavell has pondered the idea of philosophy as translation (see Standish and Saito 2017).
- 9.
Emerson writes that conversation is a game of circles: “When each new speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker, to oppress us with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men” (“Circles”, in Emerson 1983, p. 408). Wittgenstein writes: “A. picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein 2009, §115). In The Republic, Plato provides the allegory of the Cave.
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Standish, P. (2020). Tu Weiming, Liberal Education, and the Dialogue of the Humanities. In: Lewin, D., Kenklies, K. (eds) East Asian Pedagogies. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45673-3_6
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