The Dancing Ru: A Confucian Aesthetics of Virtue

Abstract

Feminist and postmodern critics appear to have placed the final nail in the coffin of the traditional idea of ethics as obedience to a moral code. For postmodernists, universal moral laws are the ethical expression of logocentric and essentialist thinking and are more intelligibly conceived as abstractions from particular moral decision making. Feminists are more specific in their claim that this type of morality represents one of the most pervasive forms of patriarchy-to wit: the tyranny of the divine father who created the rules and the earthly fathers who have enforced them. Both deontological and utilitarian perspectives also assume a disembodied, impersonal self, which is a pale and misleading shadow of our own engaged personal agency. In his book From Morality to Virtue, Michael Slote criticizes Kant for his moral asymmetry-for example, the failure to help is wrong only when applied to others and not to the self. He also critiques utilitarianism for its reductionism and, at least in its Singerian form, its unreasonable moral demands such as the voluntary equalization of living standards. The most constructive response to the crisis in moral theory has been the revival of virtue ethics, an ethics that has the advantages of being personal, contextual, and, as I will argue, normative as well. In this essay I will also propose that the best way to refound virtue ethics is to return to the Greek concept of technC tou biou, literally of life. The ancients did not distinguish between craft and fine arts, and the meaning of techn6, even in its Latin form of ars, still retains the meaning of skillful crafting and discipline. In Greco-Roman culture these techniques were very specific, covering dietetics, economics, and erotics. In ancient China moral cultivation was intimately connected to the arts, from the art of archery to poetry, music, and dance such that virtually every activity would have both a moral and an aesthetic meaning. A Chinese poet of the Book of Odes conceives of moral development as similar