Peterman, James F., Whose Tradition? Which Dao?—Confucius and Wittgenstein on Moral Learning and Reflection

Abstract

James Peterman’s book Whose Tradition? Which Dao? is offered as “the first fulllength comparative study of the ethics of ancient Chinese ethicist Confucius and the moral aspects of the later therapeutic approach to philosophy of twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein” (ix). This is a reasonable claim. A survey of the existing literature on Confucius and onWittgenstein both in English and in Chinese (for a survey of Wittgenstein study in China, see ZHANG Xueguang, “Wittgenstein in China,” Philosophical Investigations, Dec. 2014; DOI: 10.1111/phin.12067) reveals nothing comparable. In this regard this book is an important, pioneering comparative study. Peterman suggests that his project is “unlikely” (1) if only because Confucius’s teachings appear normative—“to clarify dao 道 [roughly the Way] with the goal of fostering self-cultivation and culture-wide recovery of dao” (5), while Wittgenstein’s later philosophy appears to be “meta-ethical” (3). Nevertheless, Peterman believes that Confucius and Wittgenstein share similar “ungrounded spirits” (4), in particular the spirit of leaving ethical practices non-justified theoretically or metaphysically. Moreover, he notes that Confucius and Wittgenstein provide “a roughly similar account of the norms embedded in human life and language,” norms that are acquired blindly “through learning” (4) and “bedrock practices” (5)—the questioning of which would betray “the questioner’s failure to understand them” (21). Peterman calls this “ungrounded spirit” shared by Wittgenstein and Confucius the “realistic spirit,” a phrase used by Wittgenstein scholar Cora Diamond which is not to be confused with philosophical realism. The realistic spirit, as Peterman puts it, is a spirit that avoids “abstract, theoretical reflection on questions of moral epistemology and ontology” (x). In the case of Confucius, he argues, this spirit is expressed as “open-ended,” resistant to Dao (2015) 14:467–471 DOI 10.1007/s11712-015-9446-x