23. Amy Olberding on Confucian Ethics

In our final episode on classical Confucianism, our interview guest tells us about the surprising moral depth of the concept of "etiquette".

• A. Olberding “The Consummation of Sorrow: An Analysis of Confucius’ Grief for Yan Hui,” Philosophy East and West 54 (2004), 279-301.

• A. Olberding “The Educative Function of Personal Style in the Analects,” Philosophy East and West 57 (2007), 357-74.

• A. Olberding “Dreaming of the Duke of Zhou:  Exemplarism and the Analects,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 35 (2008), 625-39.

• A. Olberding “'Ascending the Hall’:  Demeanor and Moral Improvement in the Analects," Philosophy East and West 59 (2009), 503-22.

• A. Olberding and P.J. Ivanhoe (eds), Mortality in Traditional Chinese Thought (Albany: 2011).

• A. Olberding, Moral Exemplars in the Analects: The Good Person Is That (London: 2012).

• A. Olberding (ed.), Dao Companion to the Analects (New York: 2014).

• A. Olberding “Confucius’ Complaints and the Analects’ Account of the Good Life,” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 12 (2013), 417-40.

• A. Olberding “From Corpses to Courtesy: Xunzi and the Defense of Etiquette," Journal of Value Inquiry 49 (2015), 145-59.

• A. Olberding “Etiquette: A Confucian Contribution to Moral Philosophy,” Ethics 126 (2016), 422-46.

• A. Olberding, The Wrong of Rudeness (New York: 2019).

Note: this transcription was produced by automatic voice recognition software. It has been corrected by hand, but may still contain errors. We are very grateful to Tim Wittenborg for his production of the automated transcripts and for the efforts of a team of volunteer listeners who corrected the texts.

PA: Thanks so much for coming on the series. This is going to be our culminating episode on Confucianism, and we're going to be talking a lot about the concept of Li (礼), which we have tended to translate as ritual or ritual propriety. But you've suggested a rather unusual translation for it, which is etiquette. Can you explain what you take them to mean by Li and why you thought it would be interesting or useful to translate it as etiquette?

AO: The concept Li embraces a whole cluster of what are now distinct English terms. It includes etiquette, manners, ritual, ceremony, civility. It runs the gamut of what we include to describe a well-mannered person. I tend to use etiquette primarily as a corrective to how I think some of my students, as well as some of the scholarship, tend to talk about it. Ritual in English does not have the breadth, I think, that etiquette does. And when we speak of Li in terms of ritual, we can sometimes use ritual to refer merely to personal habits. We can use ritual to refer exclusively to forms of high ceremony, the big rituals of life, funerals, weddings, and so forth. But we don't tend to associate ritual with some of the more prosaic rules of mannerly conduct, saying thank you, saying please, acknowledging others, greeting others, the ways in which we encode certain kinds of status designations in terms of our interactions with each other, the way we communicate respect on a daily basis. And Li really includes all of those. I would not always translate Li as etiquette. In some contexts, it clearly means something like being well-mannered, and that's a very broad description. In other contexts, it can mean something like civilly appropriate, and that's an equally respectable way to translate Li in those kinds of contexts. What the term etiquette tends to designate in English-speaking history are literally the codes of rules that you're meant to follow. So that when someone is offering some gesture of beneficence toward me, I say thank you. When I'm making a request, I say please. When you are at a wedding, there are particular ways to behave and not to behave, and there are rules. And our etiquette manuals detail what these rules would be. For the Confucians, there was a sensibility about particular rules, and there are ritual manuals in early China that detail what those rules would be. And I think it's at our peril as scholars of early Confucianism to see Li as merely a conceptual value that is meant to be instantiated in terms of one's personal presentation, and independently of the shared conventions the culture has for demonstrations of respect. So in other words, if I want to express gratitude, I don't make up from scratch how to do that. We have conventions about how gratitude is expressed, and following those conventions is what renders my behaviour intelligible. So we can see etiquette as a set of rules that renders our well-meaning intelligible to each other. And I think that's part of what Li is in the early Confucian context. The rule boundedness of it is important to how Li operates, because by following the conventions, we are engaged in a social practice that makes what we're doing meaningful to the people around us. 

PA: Just last week, I was actually teaching this to some students here in Germany, to a large extent on the basis of things you've written about. I said to them that I thought a really good example of the Asian concept and practice of Li is the fact that in German, you have to call people either du or Sie, so in other words, either informal you or formal you. So it's the same as tu and usted in Spanish, and tu and vous in French. We don't have this in English. And you can offend people if you get it wrong, and children have to be taught to do it. If you're a grownup and you move to Germany like me, you have to learn to do it, right? I think it's a nice example because it shows your good intentions, like respect, familiarity, intimacy. But on the other hand, it also reinforces hierarchy, which it seems that Confucian ritual does a lot of the time, too. So I'll just throw that out there as a possible example of something we wouldn't normally call a ritual, but it seems to be a really good illustration of Li.

AO: Yeah, exactly. And I think that thinking of it in terms of etiquette is helpful because it has to be taught to children, and it's not a matter of conveying to them merely be nice to other people. Instead, there's an agreed upon convention associated with being nice or being respectful. You can't separate the niceness and respectability from the convention because that's how your conduct makes sense to other people.

PA: Does that leave room for what we might call improvisation? I think with the example I just gave, the du and Sie example, so formal and formal second person verbs, you're not really supposed to improvise, right? There's kind of a right answer in almost every situation. And I think the word etiquette suggests hard and fast rules, right? You're supposed to use this fork to eat your salad and this other fork to eat your main course. So is that true with Confucian Li, too? There's always a right answer? Or can you explore some boundary cases or is there some kind of leeway? 

AO: I think there is lots of room for improvisation. To introduce a distinction that is not native to Confucianism but that works here is one from Judith Martin. She wrote under the name Miss Manners. But she talks about the distinction between manners and etiquette. Both of these, I think, are well represented in the term Li. It's only by context that we can really assess which end of the spectrum it's ending on. What she calls manners are those values that you're trying to instantiate. So you want to show respect, consideration, toleration, well-meaningness to other people, right? Those are the values that you're seeking to instantiate and manifest in your behavior. Etiquette is the code or set of rules by which you do that. As you use that code of rules and those norms of behavior, there are all ways in which deviation might be more successful in communicating respect or consideration. There's an example in the Analects where Kongzi is hosting and there is a blind music master. The music master would have been his social subordinate. But Kongzi, instead of treating him in the rule-bounded appropriate way as a social subordinate, guides him and orients him to the room. This is a behavior that would have been in violation of the letter of the Li: It's not proper etiquette. But it was the considerate thing to do. So if you want to manifest being considerate or respectful, sometimes you will need to break the rules or conform them differently to the situation. There's a whole other level of style in terms of how you communicate what you wish to communicate. The example I tend to use with my students is we all recognize that you can follow the social script for making an apology. You can say, I'm sorry, but if you say, I'm sorry  [in a sarcastic tone], it doesn't constitute an apology, right? You have fulfilled the expectation, followed the code for apologizing, but you have stylistically inflected it in such a way that no one treats it as an apology. It really isn't one. I think those are the kinds of subtleties and gradations and variations. One of the things that the Confucians are exceptional at is recognizing that all our modes of interaction are full of subtleties of tone, nuance, demeanor, style. When they talk about following the rules, they recognize that not only is there room for improvisation, but there are better and worse ways to accord oneself with the rules, even just stylistically. Depending on what you're seeking to do, you can be very polite and snub someone, too. I think they recognize those things. 

PA: You talk about facial expression, too, like the child sort of looks cranky while doing something the parents have told the child to do. That doesn't really count as filial piety, right? 

AO: Exactly. 

PA: So that's manners or etiquette. Maybe we can talk about the flip side, which we might call rudeness, because actually you've written a whole book about rudeness, which is really a fantastic idea. I wonder if people always expect you to be incredibly polite now, or maybe they expect you to be incredibly rude. 

AO: They do. I was once at a conference and everybody went to dinner after the talk. I had given my talk and nobody was sitting next to me. Finally, somebody came and sat next to me and said, we're all afraid to sit next to you because we might not have good enough table manners. I felt terrible because I was hoping that would come across in the book. I am not especially adept at following etiquette. 

PA: And you're also not scalded. 

AO: Far from it. I mean, the book is not scalded. 

PA: Oh, not at all. It probably happened to Kongzi, like no one wanted to sit next to Kongzi. 

AO: And I do think it's worth, if you're reading the Analects, look for how funny Kongzi is. I think Kongzi is actually in numerous passages engaging in self-satirization. Sometimes he's being a bit of a snob, but he's not stodgy, I don't think. He's the rigid, rule-following, polite school morm that people might take him to be. 

PA: Right. In fact, he would as an expert at making people feel at ease, as you just said. When you talk about rudeness, is that just the converse of Li? In other words, is it the opposite? So whenever you're not showing Li, it means you're being rude and vice versa? 

AO: The most basic way to account for what rudeness would be would be conduct that communicates disrespect, inconsideration, intolerance, the absence of prosocial orientation toward others. Rudeness is not merely that you have not shown respect or consideration, but that you've not shown it in a context where it would ordinarily be expected. We frequently engage in ways that have us only minimally interacting with each other at all, right? I mean, where we're not particularly showing anything to each other. I don't think that constitutes rudeness. Karen Stohr writes a little bit about what's called the nod line. If you live out in a rural community the way I do, if you encounter another human being out here, you wave or you nod because there just aren't many of us out here. As you go down the road, there's a characteristic gesture. You raise your finger off the steering wheel. Everybody waves to each other and nobody knows each other going down the road. When you have a low population area, there's an expectation that if you see another human being, you greet them in some way. But for most of our interactions with other human beings, we're in areas where we're more frequently in contact with them. I don't think there's an expectation of any particular kind of treatment. Sometimes, preserving distance is a form of politeness. Rudeness is just not observing the distance we're meant to keep from each other. If you're on a crowded subway car, engaging everyone around you in conversation at high volume is a form of rudeness or inconsideration. I think these ways of conceptualizing what rudeness is. It is going to be context dependent. 

PA: Yeah, it seems like rudeness then wouldn't just be a failure to show consideration. It actually has to be a violation of an expectation of showing consideration in a certain way. I don't need to wave at everyone in Munich because there's too many people, so it's not rude. Right. But neither would it be rude to wave at them, right? So it's sort of neutral waving or not.

AO: I think one aspect of Li that is an undercurrent in what the early Confucians offer is that to really succeed at being a well-mannered person, it isn't merely about one's conduct. It's also about the acuity of one's attention. Having a sense of the context that you're in, what the demands of that context are, what the expectations of that context are, the particularities of the environment is part of being well-mannered as well. I don't talk about that as much in my book, but I do think that a lot of what a person who follows Li has to do is simply attend to the others around them and be good at it. 

PA: What about a case where I'm being polite? I'm using etiquette, or I'm observing Li in some sense, but in my mind, I don't feel it. So I was thinking about a case where I meet someone I really don't like, and I smile and shake their hand and say, how are you doing? Outwardly, it seems like I'm being perfectly polite and I'm certainly observing the rules of etiquette, but inward, I'm thinking, oh, this jerk! Can't stand this guy! What would they say about that kind of case? Would they say I'm doing well because I've managed to tamp down my feeling of resentments and dislike and shown politeness? Or would they say that it doesn't count as Li because if you're really performing Li, then you actually have to have this kind of attentiveness to the other person that you were just describing? 

AO: There's a continuum such that a very adept practitioner of Li, such as Kongzi, is going to have a perfectly realized harmony between what Li would require and his inner disposition. There's that passage in the Analects that says, finally, when he reaches 70, he can follow his heart and mind without overstepping the boundaries. And the idea is that what he wants to do and what he should do, line up because he's in such a chord with what's morally good and appropriate and so forth. That's the ideal. However, for most of us, that's a pipe dream. We're never going to achieve that level of expertise and fluidity. I think in that context, in most situations, not all, a Confucian would view a bit of simulation or dissimulation about what my internal feelings are as potentially useful training. There is not this expectation that my behavior issues from my feelings so that when I feel gratitude, I say thank you. Instead, there's an assumption of a feedback loop where my well-meaningness toward other people is not something that comes from inside me and manifests in behavior. It's possible it happens that way, but it's also possible that I engage in the behavior of well-meaning people and that makes me more well-meaning internally. So my behavior can steer my internal life in important ways. In Western philosophical tradition, people like Rousseau would say that good manners are just fakery. We're just having to put on a mask that conceals how we really feel. I think the Confucians would treat simulating attitudes that I don't have towards someone else as a potential site for trying to cultivate those feelings. So if I don't feel particularly positive towards someone, behaving in a way that is positive toward them can help bring those feelings along. So that we can, by practicing the right kind of conduct even when we don't quote unquote ‘feel it’, we can start to bring our internal states along. Now, does that mean we should always put on a friendly face and shake the hand of people we despise? Not necessarily. There may be circumstances in which declining to follow Li would be the better thing to do. So it's not that the Confucians would say, just do it and the feelings will come. It's simply that they would say, you can't await feeling before you engage in proper conduct. You want to engage in pro-social conduct ahead of those attitudes coming on because that's part of how those attitudes develop. When we tell our children when they're tiny to say thank you to other people, we're not telling them to say thank you because we want them to follow the social script. We primarily want to instil the feeling of gratitude. By having them recite the words to say thank you, the behavior is meant to steer the internal life. By engaging in pro-social gestures, even with people toward whom we don't have particularly positive social feelings, the idea is that we're trying to cultivate more of those feelings in ourselves. 

PA: Do you think that there's sometimes a place for being rude? In other words, you're achieving something useful by being rude. 

AO: Yes, absolutely. I think that in the early Confucian context, rudeness is recognized. There are occasions when Kongzi is rude and sometimes there doesn't seem to be any particular point to it. There's a passage where he's out in the provinces listening to a musical performance and he says in this incredibly sneering statement that it sounds like using an ox cleaver to kill a chicken. It's a completely ungenerous thing to say. He says it to the organizer of the musical performance. He defends it by saying he was joking, which of course makes it even worse. That's an occasion where we're presented with an exemplar being rude and it looks mostly just like an error. It's an error he doesn't recover from well by saying, I'm only joking. Everybody knows that's the worst thing to say when you're being rude. So there is room for rudeness in the sense that even the most admired exemplar in early Confucianism is shown sometimes being rude. But I also think that at a more pointed level, there's room for dissent via rudeness. One mistake that I think is commonplace in our contemporary idiom that isn't so in the early Chinese context is it often seems to me, particularly in contemporary political discourse, that people equate dissent and rudeness as if the only mechanism to dissent from something is this in your face confrontational deliberate gestures of disrespect and so forth. There's room for rudeness as a form of dissent, whether we're looking at the early Confucians or now. But I think that one of the things that early Confucians recognize is there are incredibly, quote unquote, ‘polite ways’ to dissent as well. They, in a sense, incentivize looking for those as particularly potent. I would argue that in our own era, one practical problem with recognizing that there is room for rudeness is to say, now there's all kinds of room for it, but it's increasingly meaningless. If the motivation for your rudeness is to achieve some kind of potency or attention to the moral point you seek to make, I think we live in an era where rudeness has lost a lot of its power for doing that. 

PA: It's not shocking anymore. It's just typical. 

AO: There will always be room for rudeness as a form of dissent, if nothing else. But how much room there is and how much permission you should give yourself has to take into account its efficacy. I think rudeness as a mechanism for communicating unhappiness lost a lot of its efficacy recently. 

PA: There was something else I wanted to ask you about, which is whether Li, and maybe even etiquette in our own time and place, reinforces hierarchical relationships. If you think about du and Sie, there are some relationships in Germany where one of the people is a du and the other is a Sie. For example, children talking to adults, very Confucian example. Children are always du. Children are supposed to call strange adults.  I mean, not strange adults, but you know what I mean. Non-family members. They're supposed to call them Sie. Right? You can imagine that in ancient China, a lot of the practices of knee would involve things like how do servants relate to their masters? How does the citizen relate to the ruler? How does the wife relate to the husband? to name a particularly problematic case. Do you think that Li is problematic in that sense? Or do you think it can also offer resources for critiquing social hierarchy? 

AO: Historically, Li would have been very problematic with respect to the nature and extent of the hierarchies that would have been coded. So there certainly would have been hierarchies that we would not wish to accept and so forth. So as a historical matter, no one is following the Confucian Li now. The actual practices, the etiquette. But if we look at etiquette as a broader, more general category and ask, does etiquette inevitably code hierarchies? I would suspect so. I'm not sure about that. But there could be an egalitarian version of etiquette. But there's nothing wrong with the hierarchies of which we morally approve. In my own case, I can't see any difficulty in expecting that there are earned hierarchies that might be worth preserving. So when we are talking to someone about their field of expertise, that we show more deference. Whether that expert is one's physician, a judge, a plumber, or electrician, there would be modes of interaction that would be deferential to earned expertise. I think that seems a reasonable form of hierarchy. Hierarchy with respect to elders is often defensible. To me, contemporary philosophy has long neglected treating etiquette as a moral subject. We haven't had the conversations and arguments that we would need to suss out how we want to think of these things. In other words, I think this is an area for philosophizing about which there would be multiple competing points of view worth hashing out.

PA: An example you mentioned earlier, the one with the music master, you mentioned that the music master is socially inferior to Kongzi. So the fact that he's so polite to him, that's what I was thinking of when I said, couldn't you use Li to subtly work against social hierarchy, to be extremely polite and attentive to someone who's in theory is your ‘inferior’, right, in scare quotes, to show that you don't consider them to be your inferior. 

AO: I think you can. And I think professors are doing this all the time. When they show up, I don't know about in Munich, but in the US, I think a lot of professors may show up for class on the first day and say, call me Amy, not Dr. So-and-so or Professor So-and-so. We can often try to reduce those status hierarchies. And I suppose part of what I was saying about those earned hierarchies is my assumption is that for most of our students, even when they're calling us by our first names, are under no illusions about which direction deference goes. 

PA: The main fact that it's actually you who's allowed to let them do it. Already says volumes. 

AO: Yeah, none of them are coming up to me and saying, you can call me Tim. 

PA: I'd like to ask you how all this stuff we've been talking about with etiquette and me relates to something else you've written about a lot. And actually we could have done a whole interview about this other topic as well, which is the idea that ethical training, if I can call it that, involves identifying and imitating role models, Kongzi being an obvious example, but also the great sages Yao and Shun. How does this idea work, first of all? And second of all, how does it relate to the idea of learning etiquette or learning Li? Because I mean, the examples we talked about before, just your parents saying, say thank you. That's not modeling a correct behavior, right? That's just telling the kid what to do. 

AO: To the dismay of parents everywhere, children mostly follow our explicit instructions, but they do pick up their manners from how we behave. Being a parent is being someone's first and most potent exemplar. My husband and I tried not to cuss around our daughter when she was young. We wound up just cussing in German. By the time she was two and a half, she was, Scheisse. The potency of an exemplar to a young child, but the idea of exemplarism, and this is not my original framework. Linda Zagzebski has loads of stuff that she's written very innovatively on exemplarism. The notion is not that we choose exemplars, but that exemplars are impressed upon us. They inspire admiration in us. And we want to be like them. The way an exemplarist moral philosophy would work would be to say, Linda Zagzebski puts it, any moral theory that has the result that Jesus, Socrates, Buddha, Kongzi are not moral exemplars that we don't admire and look up to them as moral heroes is a moral theory we'll toss out. And we have this pre-theoretical conviction before we start reasoning about moral philosophy that these are people we morally admire. Exemplarism starts from that sense that we can have a strong pre-theoretical sense that we admire some people that we want to be like them. And it tries to theorize from their qualities and traits about what qualities and traits we would wish to have that we think are morally valuable. There's room in this model for there being all kinds of noise. The way I put it was in terms of my own grandfather. My grandfather was a very admirable man who I admired deeply. He was a farmer and he had a particular way of lacing up his work boots that I just as a child found magical. You know, the ones with the hooks and he would never untie them and just run them back and forth. As a child, I couldn't tie my boots that way and I thought that was just magical. But that's not relevant to why you would morally admire him. So when you think of who an exemplar is, part of what you're puzzling out is what are the qualities that are inspiring moral admiration and what are the qualities that you would seek to cultivate? Which ones of them stand up to examination as traits that we would wish to cultivate? Now, I think in the early Confucian context, there's this, I don't know if we would call it an assumption, but this expectation at least that part of what we admire in moral exemplars is their ability on a prosaic, everyday level to operate in a pro-social way with other human beings. And there is a recognition that doing that is difficult. We can think of moral heroism in multiple ways. One way is the model of Socrates who in this incredibly flashy way, his life ends with this test of his principles and he gives his life up. Another way is looking at a model like Kongzi where a lot of what's noticed about him is his devotion on a day-to-day level of living and commitment to what he values. And that the way in which he exhibits in ordinary prosaic conduct a kind of commitment to the good, which is what Li represents in some ways, a commitment to the good, is testament to the kind of character that he has and the kind of character that we should wish for ourselves. I'm not sure if that covered everything you were asking or if that was maybe too abstract.

PA: That was great. I mean, you were trying to summarize the argument of an entire book, so I think you did pretty well. Let me ask you just one last thing though. Actually, this is something Karen suggested that I ask and I think it's a really interesting question. You have been talking to us mostly about how Confucianism could provide a resource for us in thinking about how to live our lives, right? But do you think that we could go in the other direction too? So in thinking about things like rudeness and etiquette and also exemplarism, do you think that has occasioned insights into how Confucianism might need to be revised? So like where it falls short or where it maybe needs to be modified to match your intuitions or your arguments about these topics?

AO: I find this question a bit difficult just because what I have been describing, and I hope I've been consistent in doing this, is talking about early Confucianism. So the texts with which I work are ancient pre-Qin dynasty texts. So this version of Confucianism does not exist anymore, but Confucianism, I mean, in a sense, the question here parallels something like, are there things that we could suggest about Christianity while reading Aquinas? But Aquinas is not Christianity anymore in the sense that the things that are in our immediate range that are calling themselves Christianity or that are calling themselves Confucianism have historical ties to Kongzi and Aquinas. But whatever it is that we're taking from Kongzi and Aquinas is not a model employed by contemporary Confucianism. So with respect to what we could suggest in correction or improvement or alteration in Confucianism, from my point of view, I can only speak to what those ancients were talking about.

PA: Maybe modern modifications have already happened, right?

AO: And Chinese history is a very long history of people from different directions modifying these ideas. There is really interesting work being done that seeks to make Confucianism very contemporary. I'm thinking of Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee has work on care and Confucianism and talks about things like elder care, along with modifying the types of relationships that are sketched out in early Confucianism. 

PA: Yeah, something that I think has become clear even from the episodes we've devoted to Confucianism is that it's a vast and very nuanced body of ideas, even just if you think about the time up to Sun Tzu, right? Never mind going up through the development of Confucianism during the Han period and what people call Neo-Confucianism and up to modern day Confucianism. So really we've only just looked at the beginning and it's already this enormously complicated phenomenon, which obviously has a lot of resources to contemporary philosophers on all kinds of issues. 

AO: Yeah. 

PA: Okay. Well, on that inspiring note, thank Amy Olberding very much. Like I said, that brings us to the end of our coverage of Confucianism, although it will keep coming up because we're going to be moving on to other, maybe schools is the wrong word, but other strands within ancient Chinese thought like Mohism and Daoism that also respond to Confucianism. So we'll be looking at some of those debates.