§109. For the Love of Learning

Reverence for the past made Confucius an empiricist. He needed to inves­tigate, incessantly striving to enhance his knowledge of the classics and the details of ceremony. “Maybe there are people who can act without know­ledge, but I am not one of them,” he said.

“Love of learning” (hao xue) is referred to eight times in the Confucian Analects (Lun yu). It is even in these terms that Confucius identifies himself to us. “There is no one who matches my love for learning.” To love learning implies already having some success in learning and feeling joy at the pros­pect of more. Loving learning is not loving knowledge, which is to love a goal, while loving learning loves a process, study and inquiry, investigating things. In this context, learning means studying the classics. At the time of Confucius, these were the Book of Songs, Spring and Autumn Annals, Book of Changes, Book of History, and Book of Rites. In the Song dynasty, the canon expands to include the so-called Four Books, namely, Da xue, Analects, Mengzi, and Zhongyong; and the Dynastic histories.⁸⁴

To study this material was, in effect, to memorize it, though one is expected to learn more than words and their order. Analects describes the learning of perfected persons: they have learned to ask good questions; they have learned the courage appropriate to inquiry, overcoming both modesty and pride, learning to seek knowledge anywhere, even from inferiors; they have learned awareness of what they do not know; above all, they have learned to learn from themselves and not require tutelage.

The experience that matters most to Confucians is the experience of the past conveyed to the heart through the medium of the classics. “When you put them down for a moment, for that moment your virtuous nature is neglected.” Through respectful ceremony and sincere learning, Confucian teachers cultivate continuity with the experience that remote sage authors deposited in these revered works. Despite the text at the center, classical learning is a school of experience. The experience is not crassly sensuous after the manner of Condillac or Mill. It is experience of a qualitatively dif­ferent character than ordinary seeing, hearing, and moving around. The sages are the most successful human beings who have ever lived, and sincere and diligent study of the classics, the record of their experience, cultivates intuitive continuity between their experience and the present generation. Such a concept of experience can be compared to Dilthey's Nacherleben, re­experiencing, retrospectively reactivating the creative context in which an expression of lived experience (such as a classical text) was produced.⁸⁶

Modern European empiricisms typically repudiate classical learning; they learn from nature, not from books. The difference is less vivid to Confucians than to Bacon or Galileo. When the books are historical records of the his­torical experience of historical sages—as Confucians were convinced their classics were—then book-learning is learning from experience, vicarious experience perhaps, but still an ultimately empirical legacy whose least par­ticle savors of wisdom.

Later Confucians would assure the founder that he did have innate know­ledge of virtue. We all do. We just have to find a way past self-imposed obstacles and reconnect with our original heart, recovering what Mencius called liang zhi, that is, genuine, pure, original knowledge. There is a tradi­tion of translating liang zhi as “innate knowledge” It is not wrong: the idea is a knowing that comes with human nature, though not in advance of per­ception but in advance of desire. The argument for innate knowledge in Plato and Descartes is that we could not have the perceptions we do if concepts had to await perception. The argument of Mencius in antiquity and later neo­Confucians is that we cannot perfect ourselves as human beings unless we recover a virtuous heart as it was before the wreckage of selfish desire.

Plato and Descartes say we must turn away from seeing and hearing if we want scientific knowledge of truth. Mencius and Wang Yangming say we have to rehabilitate the disabling corruption of an original heart and let it become active again, when goodness will flow through our action like water to the sea. Plato thought the study of mathematics might assist the soul's reo­rientation, but for the implacably secular Confucians the only way to correct the errors of ordinary experience is with more and better experience, a more artful, disciplined experience, of which the study of the classics and ceremo­nial practice are the pedagogic centerpiece. Recovering the original heart of liangzhi does not promote science; it promotes virtuous humanity.