Pragmatist Aesthetics and Confucianism

Abstract

I am grateful to Scott Stroud for organizing this symposium and inviting me to discuss pragmatist aesthetics and Confucianism. Neither field formed part of my university education, so my interest in them is essentially a product of fascination, devoid of professorial or professional pressure, though it was surely shaped by other contingencies and needs. Trained as an analytic philosopher in Jerusalem and Oxford, I first came to appreciate the power of pragmatism only in the mid-1980s when I moved to America. My awakening to the philosophical richness of Confucianism is much more recent. It began with my desire to get acquainted enough with classical Chinese philosophy in order to write prefaces for the Chinese translations (published in 2002) of Pragmatist Aesthetics and Practicing Philosophy. I very quickly became deeply impressed with the significant resonances between Chinese philosophy and the pragmatist themes that most appealed to me, so I continued my study of Chinese thought. There remains so much to learn.1 Chinese philosophy is vast and diverse, but the pragmatist tradition, while far more limited, is also far from monolithic and resists essentialist, homogenous definition. Its roots include elements of older British and German philosophies that were creatively brewed in the crucible of the New World, where they could be more fruitfully mixed with greater freedom because they could function free from the constraints imposed by their old national cultural fields. The multiple roots of pragmatism also extend to Asian thought. Emerson, widely recognized as a prophet of pragmatism before the movement's official beginning with C. S. Peirce, was deeply inspired by the