E-Journal of Philosophy of Education:
International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 3, 2018

A Way of Becoming Human:
Between the Ritualized Body and a Humanizing Action
Duck-Joo KWAK
Seoul National University

1. Ritual Proprieties for self-cultivation and East Asian humanities
What does it mean to cultivate ‘humanity’ in education? How is it supposed to beconnected to ‘humanities education’? Humanities education in schools or colleges is
expected to cultivate humanity in youngsters. But what does ‘humanity’ mean here?
Different traditions may respond differently. When I was in a junior high school, theschool textbook for moral education specified three types of the educated: a man of goodcharacter, a man of deep knowledge, a man of high fame. I was taught that the ‘man ofgood character’ deserved genuinely to be called the educated. (As a young adolescent, it
was really touching to discover this.) When Koreans say that they expect the school tocultivate ‘humanity’ in youngsters, it usually means the formation of ‘good character’.
And the core of good character is considered to be the disposition to conform to social
norms, i.e., obeying teachers and the elderly and knowing how to behave in relation toother people of a different status, a disposition associated with the essential Confucian
virtue of ‘jen’(仁), namely, benevolence or love of others.
This sense of good character is the basis of ‘the noble man’(君子, junzi), the moral
ideal of Confucianism, which has dominated the minds of Korean people since theestablishment of the neo-Confucian Chosun dynasty in the 14th century. But the ultimate
purpose of the noble man is to become a sage who discovers ‘his Way(道, tao). And thediscovery of the Way is pursued through self-cultivation, which is to be practiced by two
different, yet complementary pedagogical approaches: bodily mastery of ritual proprieties
and book-reading.1 Simply put, Confucian education in Chosun dynasty can be said toconsist of two stages with two distinct approaches to self-cultivation: embodied
1

Here book-reading refers to studies of the following four classical texts of Confucianism: the Analects of Confucius,
the Mencius, The Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean.

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character-building through the Elementary Learning(小學) and understanding ofprinciple(理) through the Great Learning(大學). The former was supposed to cultivate
the basic Confucian ethics of conduct by inculcating in young people ritual propriety,namely, proper ways of behaving as a human being (Han, 2001, 31). The latter was
expected to motivate them to pursue the ultimate meaning of becoming a human throughstudy of classical Confucian texts.
In the formal school curriculum in Korea today, the studies of the classical texts arelong gone, having been replaced by modernized humanities curriculum from the West,which is usually centered on modern academic subjects, i.e., math, science, history andlanguages. Along with this change, the educational power of Confucian ritual proprieties
as social norms appears to have been gradually reduced in the minds of modern educators
in Korea. But what seems often to be unnoticed by them is the fact that, as Roger T. Ames
says (1993, 149), “the expression and performance of the body, like other Confucian
preoccupations such as the practice of ritual, the playing of music, the writing ofcalligraphy or the composition of literature,” was a critical “medium for self-articulation”
for the Confucian educated. Thus, even if young Korean students today are taught
modernized subject-matters in school, their embodied educational experiences are still
greatly influenced by informal school culture that is pervasively Confucian, if not
dominantly. This means that the kind of humanity to be developed through the official
curriculum tends to be at odd with the kind of humanity encouraged for young people
through the hidden curriculum. For example, when Martha Nussbaum claims that thehumanities education in this globalizing world should aim at educating youngsters as‘good citizens’ who have, among other capacities, a capacity to care about others, nearand distant, with genuine concern, as well as a capacity for critical thinking to raise a
dissenting voice in a given society (2010, 45-46), we Korean teachers may find it
appealing as a world-spirit, yet without having it affect the way we lead our lives.
My underlying concern here has to do with the fact that the idea of ‘humanity’ in
the Confucian sense is often found to be at odd with the idea of humanity assumed by themodernized school curriculum. Some qualitative gap between the two kinds ofhumanities can often be experienced by young students under the modern school systemin east Asia. To put it in a more dramatic way, the modern education system in east Asia
forces them to live in the Confucian body with the western mind resulting in their selfhood
being seriously split or fragmented. I think that we as educators need to pay due attention
to this phenomenon and take seriously how the Confucian body is formed since the latter
was traditionally considered critical to Confucian self-cultivation as the educational ideal.
Korean educationalists’ apparent lack of appreciation of the educational power of
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D. KWAK

Confucian ritual proprieties (禮, li) for modern education may have to do with theirmodernist prejudice, which regards Confucian rituals as outmoded, being susceptible tomisuse as a means of social control. This prejudice prevents them from seeing how theConfucian ritual proprieties as social norms have in fact shaped and reproduced thedistinctive social body of modern Koreans through schooling. Resonating from
Foucault’s work on the role of disciplinary power in the formation of the modern subject,
I want to problematize progressive educators’ alleged characterization of the Confucian
practice of ritual proprieties as a form of mental indoctrination or behavioral conditioning,
either through repetitive drills or the effective states induced by group engagement. Whatis often neglected in this view are more subtle and ambivalent effects of the ritual on ourbodies in education, especially from participants’ perspective. By over-simplifying thefunction of Confucian ritual as social control, we may end up depriving ourselves of oneof the most powerful educational inheritances that could be a way of empowering young
people to be active cultural agents.
This paper will introduce an alternative view on the function of ritual, termed areality-thesis formulated by Catherine Bell (1953-2008), an outstanding American
scholar in religious studies, 2 to show how ritual can be better understood from theeducational perspective. And then I will make use of this reality thesis to reinterpret the
way Confucian ritual works in forming our social body. This is intended to free ourselvesfrom the politically charged modernist criticism of Confucian ritual and to see if it could
be in fact the very source of modern subjectivity, which is usually thought to be repressedby the ritual.

2. Ritual for Social control or Ritual for Reality-forming?
Ritual practice lies at the heart of Confucianism. In Chosun dynasty, the ritualizationof political, social, and even economic relationships in a Confucian mold significantly
shaped the cultural matrix of the entire society (Deuchler, 2002, 292). On the other hand,according to Bell, “ritualization correlates with and contributes to the restraining effect ofclosed and highly structured societies” (1993, 177), whether they may be premodern or
modern. Bell also holds that a society governed by ritual assumes a fair degree of
2Catherine Bell (1953-2008) is a contemporary American scholar in religious studies, who specialized in studies ofChinese religions and ritual studies. Her book, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (1992, Oxford), is considered abreakthrough-text in religious studies that changed the framework for understanding the nature and function of ritual.
My paper will heavily draw upon her book in understanding the Confucian ritual.
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consensus, whereas another society characterized by the legalistic rule of law and orderassumes much less. Given these descriptions, Chosun society for sure, and modern Korea
to a certain extent, can be rightly considered high ritual societies.3
What was (is) the function of ritual in Chosun dynasty and in modern Korea if there
is any? I am not asking here why Confucianism traditionally takes ritual seriously as away of governing society and educating people, nor how people in Confucian society
justify or explain their ritual practice. This line of internal accounts can be or must havebeen given by many Confucian scholars and specialists (Han and al, 2001; Kato, 2016).
In fact, we can even safely suppose that in participating in ritual, people within the society
more or less know what they do and why they do what they do. My question rather comesfrom a suspicion that they may know what they do and why, but they “do not know what
what they are doing does” to themselves in participating in ritual (Bell, 1992, 108). This
question is first inspired by some post-structuralist perspective on ritual in cultural studies,
which takes ‘the body’ seriously in the account of ‘ritualization’, as in Foucault’s andBourdieu’s works. But my question above in regard to ritual is primarily educational in
the following two senses. First, it is concerned with what is exactly happening to theindividual, especially to her body, when she participates in ritual; this question is
educationally critical because educational practice is supposed to be in the end all about
the (trans)formation of the individual selfhood as a unity of one’s mind and body. Second,
it is concerned with the nature of ritual as a culturally strategic practice for the fusion
between mind and body, individual and society, thought and action, emotion and belief(Bell, 1992, 21). This fusion is exactly what modern educational practice aspires to offer
in the midst of the ever self-alienating and dehumanizing exam-obsessed school culture
in Korea.
One of the dominant accounts about what ritual does to individual participants
engaged in ritual is a repression thesis (Bell, 1992, 172-173). It says that the function ofritual is social control over the participants in the form of socialization. Here socialization
is defined as a matter of transmitting shared beliefs, or instilling a dominant ideology as
an internal subjectivity. In fact, the same understanding of ritual lies behind the abovementioned modern educators’ criticism of Confucian ritual proprieties, such as filial piety
or loyalty to the government, as a disguise for the elite class’s interest and domination
Bell uses the terms, ‘ritual,’ ‘ritual practice,’ and ‘ritualization,’ interchangeably. As following her usage without
objection, which is concerned with ritual in general, I treat without further thought Confucian ritual propriety(禮, li)
as a form of ritual to which her general account can be applied because Confucian ritual propriety as conventional
practice takes a strong formality, fitting the main features of ritual that Bell describes. The detailed discussion of it
will be followed in the next section.

3

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D. KWAK(Shin, 1970). I think this sociological criticism of Confucian ritual is parasitic on a
psychological assumption of the repression thesis: “ritualization is the controlled
displacement of chaotic and aggressive impulses” (Bell, 1992, 173). According to therepression thesis, ritualization is central to any culture as a means to dominate nature, i.e.,
the natural violence within human beings. This thesis treats ritual as an oppressive device
inherently necessary to an ordered society by being repressive of the individual; it pays
attention to how ritual exercises control the individual’s affective state to make themsocial or even moral. What is to be noted here is the thesis’s underlying assumption of
dichotomies between culture and nature, individual and society, (controlled) reason and(chaotic) emotion.
I don’t think this (sociological and psychological) account of ritual is accurateenough to be applied to Confucian ritual, even if it was politically employed that way byoppressive military regimes of the past in Korea. Bell also holds that the social control
wielded by ritual is a much more complex phenomenon than the manipulation ofaffective states or cognitive categories, as described by the repression thesis. She instead
proposes an alternative thesis called a reality-thesis by drawing upon many different
scholars and works in cultural studies, such as Geertz, Douglas, Foucault and Bourdieu
among others (Bell, 1992, 175). According to Bell, ritual does not control. It rather
constitutes a particular dynamic of social empowerment by modeling ideal relations andstructures of values. This thesis views ritual as “a symbolic modeling of the social order,
with this imaging or iconic quality as the basis of its efficacy” (Bell, 1992, 175). With thisuse of the word ‘modeling’, the thesis tries to highlight not how ritual ‘controls’ but how
it ‘defines’ social situations by being presented to social members as a reality to berendered and experienced. I think this reality thesis provides us with a better framework
through which we can more accurately understand how Confucian ritual actually works
from the participant’s perspective. Let me briefly reconstruct how the reality-thesis
explains ritual as a general account of it.
According to Bell, the purpose of ritual practice is the production of the ritualized(social or public) body. But what is noteworthy about this practice is that it does not see
itself doing that, namely, the production of the ritualized body. What is the ritualized body,by the way? Bell says: it is “a body invested with a sense of ritual” (Bell, 1992, 98). And‘a sense of ritual,’ she continues to say, is what we are embodied with as “an implicit
variety of schemes whose deployment works to produce sociocultural situations that theritualized body (of ours) can dominate in some way”. This seems to say that our repeatedpractice of ritual brings to us a variety of schemes that open to us as participants a certain
bodily horizon in which we can orient ourselves in such a way as to make ourselves feel
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that we fit to given situations. How well we are attuned to the given situations is a matterof our practical mastery of the strategic schemes in ritualization. What is to be noted here,according to the reality-thesis, is that ritual’s ability to define an order as the real in both
its internal structure and its limits is a form of control, yet a very unique kind of control
that is not experienced as such by the people involved. In other words, ritual exercise
helps to define as authoritative certain ways of seeing society by deflecting people’s
attention from other ways without their noticing of that very fact (Bell, 1992, 175-176).
How is it possible?
According to Bell, ritual does this job by being deeply implicated with the humanbody. Drawing upon a series of post-structuralist theories that identify the human bodyas a social construction in the image of society and a microcosm of the universe, thereality thesis considers the human body as one’s existential site where the mediation of
the simple dialectical interaction between the individual (perception of the world) and thesocial world (of categories) takes place (Bell, 1992, 94). Thus, it is said that through ritualthe construction of cultural reality focuses on the body, which in turn experiences theconstruction as natural to itself (Bell, 1992, 95); it is the body that makes us not noticewhat the ritual does to us by taking it as natural to itself. This means that ritual grants the
body a critical site for the social construction of reality, and the body is shaped orsocialized by rituals into the social body. Turning to this social body is a key to therelationship of one’s self, society and cosmos. Ritual as modelling this whole process ofsocialization, that is, the transformation of natural body into cultural body, transforms one
sort of man into another sort of man.
Then, how exactly does this happen through the human body? According to Bell,the invisibility of what and how ritual does is possible because ritual naturalizes arbitrary
assumptions of reality, so as to make them look necessary or real to the people involved.
Creating this misrecognition within ritual participants and making this very act invisible
to them are essential to the successful operation of ritual in defining reality. In Bell’s view
(1992, 112), the reason ritual could function in this manner has to do with the way it
communicates with the participants. Ritual communication differs from linguistic
communication in its function in two ways. First, the way ritual expresses its codes or
principles is not discursive but performative as in such speech-acts as ‘promising’ or‘declaration of wedding’. What is distinctive about ritual is not what it says or symbolizes
but what it does things to the people involved in it. Ritual is always a matter of theperformance of gestures and the manipulation of objects. Ritual languages are deeds inthemselves that accomplish things; they operate by showing and creating things to beperceived and interpreted. There is no message to be conveyed; they act upon reality (Bell,
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1992, 111) and thereby create a situation that supplies to the participants the opportunity
to infer and master the codes underlying the ostensible activity of the rite for their future
actions. Second, this means that ritual communication plays on ambiguities with thesymbolic meanings of ritual codes when it produces model-experiences in theparticipants. Its underlying codes or scheme are not determined enough to instructspecific meanings to the participants; the specific meanings are supposed to be inferredand mastered by them (Bell, 1992, 181). We may describe this (internal and personal)
inference and appreciation as part of physical self-cultivation in the Confucian context.
Thus, we can say that ritual is a matter of programmed learning through activities thatinvolve the participants’ appreciation of codes, principles, and concepts, and theirreproduction in practice and in action. These two strategies of ritual inevitably elude thefull articulation of the work ritual does to the participants themselves; full articulation is
not a medium that can grasp the ritual practice (Bell, 1992, 97 & 114).
Let me pause here to examine more closely exactly how the participants do notnotice the work ritual does to themselves or what is happening to themselves while ritual
does its job. Adapting Bourdieu’s discussion of practice, Bell holds (1992, 98-99) that we
can speak of the natural logic of ritual, logic embodied in the physical movements of the
body and thereby lodged beyond our grasp of consciousness and articulation. The
principle underlying this logic can be made explicit only with great difficulty; they are
rarely in themselves the objects of scrutiny or contention. In other words, for Bell, themolding process of our social body within a highly structured environment of ritual often
does not come up to our inner state of mind. Rather it primarily acts to restructure ourbodies in every performance of our acts themselves. Hence, for example, a required
bowing (to the elderly) in the Confucian ritual does not merely communicate oursubordination to the person we bow to. For all intents and purposes, our practice ofbowing produces a subordinated bower in and through the act itself. Of course,
sometimes on another level within ritualization, such an act of bowing may actually set
up a bifurcation between the external show of subordination and an internal act of
resistance. But in either case, the ritual practice shapes one’s deep ontological orientation
to the social life, involving the setting up of oppositions and differentiation in theorientation, i.e., social oppositions of the elderly and the young or man and woman,
combined with geographical oppositions of right and left or above and below.
Through the privileging of a certain set of categories built into such an exercise ofgenerating hierarchical schemes, a loose sense of totality and systematicity is producedin one’s order of the world (Bell, 1992, 104). This means that ritual’s function in our life,
since it is so deeply implicated with the way our body is oriented, is more ontological
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than social in its nature. In this way, ritual dynamics afford and develop our experienceof order as well as our sense of fit between the taxonomic order and the real world ofexperience, which leads us to find the connection so natural and organic as if it were partof the way things are. Therefore, we can conclude that these structured and structuringexperiences of the world through ritual practice guarantee the reality and value of its
underlying schemes by means of our sense of fit or coherence between the instincts ofthe socialized body and the environment in which it acts.
What we can see here is that ritual does not simply act to bring the social body tothe participants. The participants also actively seek and appropriate the coherence interms of their ontological concerns or social interests, as persons or groups, so as toexperience it as more or less redemptive; this means that they are also empowered by theschemes of the rituals (Bell, 1992, 114-115). This is how, as Foucault’s concept of
micropower well shows (Foucault, 1995), ritual makes the body an arena where more
local social practices were linked to the larger scale organization of power. This is also
how ritual leaves room for the social body to turn into an active cultural agent in the formof consent, negotiation and resistance in the process of internalizing the schemed orderof reality defined by rituals. Bell says it is because the process of internalization of thescheme differentiates the private from the social selves in the actors, involving a
distancing within them of their private and social identities. This distancing is integral towhat ritual does through its elaboration of symbolic meanings, but it can be problematic,of course, if taken too far (Bell, 1992, 217; Butler, 1997, 19). The relationship between
any instance of ritualization and its immediate social reality by means of the participant’s
acts does not seem to be the mere reflection of power of given order but that of theirinterplay. Ritualization cannot be understood apart from the immediate situation, whichis reproduced in a misrecognized or transformed way through the production of ritualized
agents. Thus, we may conclude that, honoring Foucault’s terms (1995, 192 & 194), ritual
does not just control or subordinate the subject, but produces it as well.

3. Cultivation of the Ritualized body as a Way of Self-cultivation;a Case of Confucian Ritualization
How can this general account of ritual be applied to Confucian ritual in particular?4
Bell (1992, 220) summarizes several features common to all forms of ritualization: 1) strategies of differentiations
through formalization and periodicity, 2) the centrality of the body, 3) the orchestration of schemes by which the4

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D. KWAKIn what follows, I will try to make use of the reality-thesis to see the extent to which
Confucian ritual can be understood as a social practice that shapes the social body in theform of self-cultivation that could create an empowered subject. Confucianism,
especially neo-Confucianism, is a highly sophisticated system of rituals. It is not an
exaggeration to say that Confucian education is all about rituals, i. e., learning how toobey or conform to rituals in one’s actions on every level of everyday life. But what
exactly does ritual (禮, li) refer to in the Confucian context? First, it refers to
institutionalized forms of rites, which people usually tend to take as a tradition, i.e.,
periodic or celebratory rites of royal courts or ancestral worship ceremonies as a set offormal procedures. Second, Confucian ritual (li) more commonly means some patternsof overt behavior of actions that are instructed on the way we carry our bodies and makephysical gestures, as well as a set of specific rules of conducts that prescribes our roleperformances, roles such as a king, a father, or a son. Lastly, li can be described as a setof more general rules of conduct that govern one’s personal relationship with others, suchas reciprocal respect, loyalty or good faith, which is almost synonymous to what we call
today moral norms of action (Han, 2001, 16).
Let me give you some examples for these:
Do not listen with the head inclined on one side, nor answer with a loud, sharp
voice, nor look with a dissolute leer, nor keep the body in a slouching position.
Do not saunter about with a haughty gait, nor stand with one foot raised. Do not
sit with your knees wide apart, nor sleep on your face (The Elementary Learning,
3:2:2, trans, Lee, 1999, 135)
When he was in the carriage, he did not turn his head quite round, he did not talkhastily, he did not point with his hands (The Elementary Learning, 3:2:7, trans.
Lee, 1999, 140)
Parents are sometimes liable to faults and mistakes. Then the child must try tocorrect them, using, however, only the mildest and most indirect of means. If theparent refuses to change ways, the child must wait and try to correct them again
only after his respect and filial piety please them. Even if the parent is not pleased,
the child must try to correct them not to let him susceptible of dishonor for the
body defines the environment and is defined in turn by it, 4) ritual mastery, and 5) the negotiation of power to define
and appropriate the hegemonic order of the society. I think all these features are also true of Confucian rituals as
conventional practice.
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family. If the parent punishes the child for criticizing, the child is not to feel any
anger or resentment, even if beaten until blood flows. The child must continue totry to please him with high respect and filial piety (The Elementary Learning,
2:1:22, trans. Lee, 1999, 55)
Tzu-kung asked about how friend should be treated. The Master said, “Advise
them to the best of your ability and guide them properly, but stop when there is
no hope of success. Do not ask to be snubbed” (The Elementary Learning, 2:5:4,
trans. Lee, 1999, 108-109)
These passages are all from the Elementary Learning, an anthology of selections fromthe Confucian classical texts, which greatly influenced the way the Koreans oriented
education for their children.5 The Neo-Confucian scholar Chu Hui created this text forthe purpose of fostering specific and concrete modes of behavior that are both practicaland ritualistic (Kelleher, 1989). The first two passages reveal the physical aspects of selfcultivation in young people. Li includes very trivial acts of our everyday life fromsweeping and sprinkling to talking and posing the head. The last two passages touch upon
more subtle manners of conduct as a son and as a friend in learning how to converse withthe elderly and relating affectively with people around us as young people.
Young people are expected to love their parents, respect the elderly, and esteem
teachers. The mastery of all these physical appearances and behaviors prepares them toadvance to the next level, that is, the pursuit of the goal of the Great Learning: cultivating
the self, regulating the family, ruling the country, and finally establishing one’s peace ofmind in the world. The distinctiveness of this educational approach is to make young
people adopt the specific codes of behaviors, i.e., the way they carry themselves, theirfacial expression, and even the tone of one’s voice, just exactly the way the text instructs
us to do up to the level of their becoming part of our unconscious self. This means thatthey are supposed to make them part of their bodily habit without raising any questions;this obedience is critical in building their ‘good character’ as the early development of
5

The Elementary Learning is a text edited in 1187 by a well-known Neo-Confucian scholar Chi-Hui from the Songdynasty in China. But his educational influence on the Chosun dynasty of pre-modern Korea was so vast, pervasive
and lasting that his teaching from the Elementary Learning still remains deep inside of everyday moral psychology
of most of Korean middle-class parents. This text was an important part of the Neo-Confucian core curriculum,
which was taught in official educational institutes in Korea from the early Chosun dynasty until the period ofJapanese colonialism in Korea in the 1900’s. But the educational philosophy and spirit underlying the text is stillwith us in our everyday moral psychology and school culture, even if it has been rapidly disappearing (ordisintegrating) for the last few decades.
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D. KWAKtheir personality.
The significance of the Neo-Confucian teaching from the Elementary Learning
usually lies in its greater attention to ‘the social process’ of building a good character, andhow it can contribute to individual self-development. The high level of specificity ininstructing young people’s physical aspects of self-cultivation, namely, person’s
comportment, dress and habits of eating and drinking as a way of disciplining oneself andreverencing others seems to assume a strong connection between the orientation ofphysical body and moral character. That is, a ritual act itself would somehow empower
them into a good character; the former is considered the mirror of the latter. A person’s
posture and carriage would both reveal his (or her) character and influence upon forming
it. Thus, learning at this stage is not just to master prescribed code of behaviors but also
to internalize the idea that behavioral prescriptions and role models most effectively
inform one’s character. This is why it is extremely important in Confucian education foryoung people to learn how to unconditionally accord their bodily orientations andbehaviors to the specific prescriptions of conducts instructed by the elderly and the text
without reflecting or raising questions on the norms themselves underlying the behavioral
codes. It will form their character by way of shaping their moral psychology, i.e.,orienting their every little emotion and attitude for their everyday situations in accordance
to a set of Confucian norms. On this first stage of teaching, evoking action is more
important than reflection. Here we may say that this process of building a good characteris the very process of shaping the social or ritualized body in terms of reality thesis.
But how convincing is the Confucian assumption of a strong connection between
the orientation of physical body and moral character (of the social body)? It may not be
as convincing as we think it would be for two reasons. First, it seems to be empiricallypossible to conform to the prescribed behavioral norms and rituals without the expectedmoral psychology accompanied. We can pretend to conform to them, if it is necessary. In
fact, most of us who have not reached the level of “the noble man” in the Confucian sense
can be said not to be fully free from this pretension since only “the noble man” cansucceed in finding “the Way” in the sense that his every little act in the everyday life
naturally goes along with the heaven’s Way without involuntary wills on his part. Second,
it is logically possible to conceive another set of behavioral norms and rituals thecommitment to which can lead young people into the individual self-cultivation, or
perfection of one’s character, which is the ultimate purpose of the Confucian education.
In other words, the specific codes of behavioral norms and rituals prescribed by the text
can be said to be arbitrary in connection to the Confucian ideal of self-cultivation; theconnection is not necessary, but contingent. This means that there is no guarantee to make
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39a shift from the former to the latter. Then, what is the point of Confucian ritual as a wayof physical self-cultivation? Or what would possibly facilitate the connection between
them in Confucian education?
It seems that one’s participation in Confucian ritual somehow facilitates theconnection between li and good character. The question is how it does this. At this point,
we may need to call out the reality thesis discussed earlier, and ask: What is ‘the work’
that Confucian ritual does in facilitating the actual connection between them? How doesit do the job? We can say that Confucian ritual does this job by awakening jen(仁,benevolence or love of others) in the participant. This potential answer directs ourattention to the relation between li(禮) and jen(仁) in the formation of the Confucian self.
And Herbert Fingarette, a well-known Confucian scholar, gives us a helpful descriptionof the relation between li(禮) and jen(仁). He says:
Li and jen are two aspects of the same thing. Each points to an aspect of the actionof man in his distinctively human role. Li directs our attention to the traditionalsocial pattern of conduct and relationships; jen directs our attention to the person
as the one who pursues that patterns of conduct and thus maintains thoserelationships. Li also refers to the particular act in its status as exemplification ofinvariant norm; jen refers to the act as expressive of an orientation of the person,
as expressing his commitment to act as prescribed by li. Li refers to the act asovert and distinguishable pattern of sequential behaviors; jen refers to the act as
the single indivisible gesture of an actor, as his, and as particular and individual
by reference to the unique individual who performs the act and to the uniquecontext of the particular action.
Our more familiar Western terminology would be misleading. We are
tempted to go further than I have above and to say jen refers to the attitudes,
feelings, wishes and will… (Fingarette, 1972, 42-43).
Interestingly enough, Fingarette describes li and jen as two different aspects of the samething; li refers to the observable bodily objectification of patterns of conduct, whereas jen
to an act that expresses the orientation of the particular actor as a person who delivers li.
But, as suggested in the last part of the passage, Fingarette keeps warning us that weshould not take li as an overt and objective behavior in contrast with jen as a subjective
inner state, as the dualistic Cartesian mindset in the West often mistakenly conceives thehuman mind. In fact, this is why Fingarette starts with the sentence which says that “liand jen are two aspects of the same thing.”
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D. KWAKBut what does he mean by ‘the same thing’ here? One interpretation could be thatthey are ‘ontologically’ the same thing. What does this mean? By this I mean that they
are interconnected in their origin or derived from each other. Let me explain why this canbe the case by exploring some textual evidence. Confucius says in the Analects in
responding to the question raised by his disciple on how to be jen:
He who can submit oneself to li is jen (The Analects, 12:1, trans. Fingarette, 1972,
42)
When abroad, behave as though you were receiving an important guest.
When employing the service of the common people, behave as though you were
officiating at an important sacrifice.
Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire. (The Analects,12:2,
trans. Lau, 1979, 109)
Man of jen helps others to take their stand in that he himself wishes to take hisstand, and gets others there in that he himself wishes to get there. The ability totake as analogy what is near at hand can be called the method of jen (The Analects,
6:30, trans. Fingarette, 1972, 41)
The first passage says that being jen is all about being able to submit oneself to li. Thisphrase sounds surprisingly puzzling to modern ears since it says that all we need to do tobe jen (humane or benevolent) is to obey to the specific norms of actions rectified by li.
But the second passage gives us some clues towards a more intelligent understanding of
the phase. It suggests that one’s observance of li is not a mechanical nor even a practicalprocess; it is a symbolic process since we are supposed to deliver li in a certain manner,that is, an as-if mode. This symbolic process of imagining other hypothetical situations
in delivering li seems to give the practitioner a certain normative orientation, which leads
into being jen. The last passage clearly specifies that being jen can be cultivated by ourability to make the as-if analogy given the situation we are in.
By connecting this to the reality thesis, we can make sense of my claim that li andjen are ‘ontologically’ the same thing. First, as Fingarette holds that jen develops only so
far as li develops (1972, 48), they can be said to be developmentally connected. The more
one practices li up to the point of naturalizing it as part of oneself, the more he or she turns
into being jen or being humane. How? It was said earlier that ritual primarily acts torestructure our bodies in every doing of our acts. By restructuring our bodies, ritual
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involves the setting up of the fundamental schemes of the world in us whose deployment
works to produce the ritualized body, i.e., schemes of social oppositions of the elderly
and the young, or man and woman. This means that submitting oneself to li is the social
process of embodied internalization of the underlying schemes of li, which prepares thesocial body with the ability to cultivate jen in it; for the latter is developed with one’s
ability for the symbolic manipulation of the very schemes at given situations. For
example, we cannot have profound and intelligent filial pieties toward one’s parents
unless one has practical knowledge about how to behave in specific socio-familial
relations as well as extensive experiences by participation in the specific social and family
affairs, and the practical knowledge and experiences are made possible only with theembodied schemes of the social and cosmic world. This means that jen is to be developedout of one’s observance of li, which restructures our body with the basic Confucian
schemes of oppositions and differentiations that order the universe and society.
Secondly, being jen by submitting oneself to li is not just a matter of being
familiarized with practical knowledge on how to do things in certain social situations. It
is a matter of being able to attentively appreciate the symbolic meanings of the conducts
rectified by li. More specifically, being jen is deeply related to our ability to attribute someidealized meanings and purposes to the social norms rectified by li, as indicated by the‘as though’ phrases above. It can be described as a personal process of appropriation ofsocial norms rectified by li. Thus, we can say that the observance of li, which equips us
with bodily schemes of social norms, teaches young people not only practical skills on
how to behave; it also evokes some power over them that awakens jen as their
imaginative capability for the idealization of the norms they submit to. Where does thispower come from about li, then?
Third, I think that the observance of li could lead us to actively conjure up
Confucian ritual acts as real because, as the reality thesis says earlier, ritual dynamics
afford and develop our experience of order as well as our sense of fit between thetaxonomic order and the real world of experience. It makes us find this connection sonatural and organic as if it were part of the world. And the very sense of naturalness islikely to create a sense of sacredness in us who deliver li. This means that the successfully
ritualized body, let’s say, the noble man (君子, junzi), would, willingly and repeatedly,
conjure up Confucian ritual acts as real with a sense of sacredness, especially when hehas an organic sense of fit between his instincts of the ritualized body and theenvironment in which it acts. This sense of sacredness can deeply touch the participants
and awaken their sense of jen. Ritual acts can give them an ontological orientation to life
with a fulfilled sense of finding themselves as part of the universe. We can see here that
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D. KWAKli and jen are ontologically inseparable because they depend upon each other ingenerating the ritualized body.
On the other hand, in distinguishing one from the other, Fingarette emphasizes
above the nature of li as a set of patterned behavior and the nature of jen as an act of aparticular person. While warning us not to take them as dualistic, namely ‘an overt actof li’ versus ‘inner mental state of jen’, he seems rather to highlight the social or collective
dimension of li and jen’s special connection to the person who delivers the acts. Thus, we
may conclude that li and jen refer to the same act, but address different dimensions of thesame act: li addresses the social or public dimension of one’s conduct performed by theritualized body, whereas jen the personal orientation or commitment reflected in the same
conduct.
Fingarette further articulates the differences as follows:
Li stresses the act as overt, the series of movement through space and time. As
such, the act is analyzable into segments, into a series of steps, each step aprerequisite for its successor. There is therefore a way to carry out li, but not sowith jen. When we look at action from the standpoint of the actor, we use
categories that do not provide us with complex patterns of action analyzable into
spatial and temporal relationships but with “simple” acts. To put it another way;
to look at an act from the standpoint of the actor is not to shift from outer space
and time, and to look instead into an inner mysterious realm, but it is tocharacterize the act in terms of categories that do not have the same logicalfeatures as the ones that characterize the act as overt behavior (Fingarette, 1972,
49).
Fingarette holds that two different logical features govern li and jen: one analyzable inspatial and temporal terms and the other not so. Even if Fingarette seems to be interested
in articulating the logical differences between them, I am more interested in articulating
how a dynamic shift from li to jen or from jen to li internal to an actor, takes place. This
shift is supposed to take place in the ritualized body, a shift from li as the external
imposition of social norms to jen as the personal appropriation of li, which is key to theformation of good character. Even if we cannot take for granted this shift, practicing li
seems to be the necessary means to be jen. This is why Fingarette holds that practicing li
with persistence is the only way to secure the participant the way to be jen (1972, 51).
Thus, we may conclude that the practice of li facilitates jen by making one embody
the schemes of li in one’s participation in li, and that jen secures and fulfills li by making
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one relive li through one’s active interpretation of the symbolic meanings of the schemes.
Here the relation between li and jen in shaping the ritualized body looks circular. But it is
not an empty circularity; in the process, a human power seems to be created. It is a powerthat emanates from human beings as actors in ritual, and it is directed toward other humanbeings and influences them (Fingarette, 1972, 54). The way this human power is
produced in Confucian ritual could look miraculous or mysterious, especially when one’s
participation in li often looks so mechanical. But the practice of li itself is dynamic andalive if participants try to persist with it in pursuit of jen. It is a way of re-orienting one’s
whole being, living in a new way at every moment of practicing li with an act of jen. If
we follow the reality thesis, we can say that, with this humanizing act at every moment,
one can create one’s reality in a new way where one lives.

4. Conclusion
This essay starts with a deliberate suspicion about our inheritance of Confucian
ritual, only to reconsider it as a legitimate educational resource for our future generation.
It is attempted not because Confucian ritual is simply ours, but because we realize that
there is no way we east Asians can get away from it: it deeply constrains us, that is,constraining not only the way we see the world but also the way we orient ourselves inlife; it has shaped our whole mode of being. This recognition should lead us to appreciate
more of what is unique about an east-Asian tradition of humanities embodied in ourtendency to obey social norms or ritual formality, which is usually considered negativein contrast with the western tradition of humanities that emphasizes free-thinking or
independent-mindedness.
In making this argument relevant to contemporary schooling in east Asia, one of thebiggest challenges would be to create a form of educational ritual where the circularity
between li and jen is made more dynamic and productive, rather than mechanical androutine. To do so, it seems inevitable that we examine more consciously the implicit
varieties of hierarchical schemes of Confucian norms and see how they could be revisedin such a way as to be compatible with the horizontal schemes of modernity. The schemes
behind any educational ritual need to be reasonably coherent with each other whileloosely connected; otherwise, it would be hard to invite young participants to engage inthe ritual with lived experiences.
Lastly, I want to add that my educational interest in Confucian ritual, which looks
somewhat politically conservative, hides an ambition for a new perspective on education.
In contrast to the view of education in east Asia, which has traditionally taken ritual as
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D. KWAKcentral to humanities education, as well as to the view of modern education in general,
which tend to take ritual as a pre-modern tool for social control, I think that ritualization
can potentially be a good pedagogical tool as the strategic embodiment of schemes for
power relationship that can promote the forces that have been traditionally thought towork against social solidarity or control. Bell’s words below may support this somewhat
seemingly paradoxical possibility for the creation of modern subjectivity that isembedded in east-Asian culture:
It is possible that ritualization itself can generate and deploy such bifurcations of
the self as that described by Durkheim as “two things facing in different andalmost contrary directions.” If so, it would be a feature of ritualization in aparticular historical and cultural setting, a setting in which such schemes would
have some efficacious value outside the ritual (Bell, 1992, 217).

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