Early Confucian Philosophy and the Development of Compassion
Abstract
© 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. Metaphors of adorning, crafting,
water flowing downward, and growing sprouts appear in the Analects (Lunyu 論語), the
Mencius (Mengzi 孟子), and the Xunzi 荀子. They express and guide thinking about what
there is in human nature to cultivate and how it is to be cultivated. The craft metaphor
seems to imply that our nature is of the sort that must be disciplined and reshaped
to achieve goodness, while the adorning, water, and sprout metaphors imply that human
nature has an inbuilt directionality toward the ethical that should be protected or
nurtured. I argue that all the metaphors capture different aspects of human nature
and how one must work with these aspects. There is much in contemporary psychology
and neuroscience to suggest that the early Confucians were on the right track. It
is also argued that they point to a fruitful conception of ethical development that
is relational and holistic.
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/20417Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1007/s11712-015-9438-xPublication Info
Wong, DB (2015). Early Confucian Philosophy and the Development of Compassion. Dao, 14(2). pp. 157-194. 10.1007/s11712-015-9438-x. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/20417.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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David B. Wong
Susan Fox Beischer and George D. Beischer Trinity College Arts and Sciences Distinguished
Professor of Philosophy
David Wong is the Susan Fox Beischer and George D. Beischer Professor of Philosophy.
Before he came to Duke, he was the Harry Austryn Wolfson Professor of Philosophy at
Brandeis University and the John M. Findlay Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Boston
University. The main subjects of his research include 1) the nature and extent of
moral differences and similarities across and within societies and how these differences
and similarities bear on questions about the objectivity and

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