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Soup, Harmony, and Disagreement

Part of: Non-Western Philosophies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2020

DAVID B. WONG
DAVID B. WONG*
Affiliation:
DUKE UNIVERSITYd.wong@duke.edu
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Abstract

Is the ancient Confucian ideal of he 和, ‘harmony,’ a viable ideal in pluralistic societies composed of people and groups who subscribe to different ideals of the good and moral life? Is harmony compatible with accepting, even encouraging, difference and the freedom to think differently? I start with seminal characterizations of harmony in Confucian texts and then aim to chart ways harmony and freedom can be compatible and even mutually supportive while recognizing the constant possibility of conflict between them. I shall point out how the Confucian notion of harmony resonates with the Indian King Asoka's project of promoting religious pluralism. Along the way, I will make some comments of a ‘meta’ nature about the kind of interpretation I am offering of harmony in the Confucian texts and the use to which I am putting this interpretation by setting it in the context of societies that in important respects are quite different from the ones from which concepts of harmony originally emerged.

Keywords

Confucianismharmonydisagreementaccommodationritualethicspolitical philosophy
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Summer 2020 , pp. 139 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2020

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Footnotes

This article is the fifth in a special series of commissioned articles on non-Western philosophies. The fourth article article ‘“Following the Way of Heaven”: Exemplarism, Emulation, and Daoism', by Ian James Kidd, appeared in Volume 6, Issue 1, pp. 1–15.

I gratefully acknowledge the Berggruen Institute's Philosophy and Culture Center and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University for support of my work on this essay. My thanks go to Fellows of CASBS for the year 2015–2016 for their feedback and suggestions in response to portions of this paper, especially Chengyang Li and Daniel Rogers. I am grateful to audiences at Creighton University, Muhlenberg College, the University of Ottawa, the University of British Columbia at Vancouver, Santa Clara University, the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, and to Rajeev Bhargava for helping me to see the resonance between Indian and Chinese conceptions of harmony.

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