160 | Edward Slingerland on Confucianism, Daoism, and Wu Wei

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 16 August 2021

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Plato and Aristotle founded much of what we think of as Western philosophy during the fourth and fifth centuries BCE. Interestingly, that historical period also witnessed the foundation of some of the major schools of Chinese philosophy, especially Confucianism and Daoism. This is a long-overdue discussion of ancient Chinese ideas, featuring philosopher and religious-studies scholar Edward Slingerland. We talk about the relationship between these two schools of thought, and their differences and similarities with Western philosophy. One of the biggest ideas is wu wei, or “effortless action” — the way that true mastery consists of doing things without too much conscious control. Today we would call it “flow” or “being in the zone,” but the idea stretches back quite a ways.

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Edward Slingerland received his Ph.D. in religious studies from Stanford. He is currently Distinguished University Scholar, Professor of Philosophy, and Associate Member of the departments of Asian Studies and Psychology at the University of British Columbia. He is Director of the Database of Religious History, and co-director of the Center for the Study of Human Evolution, Cognition, and Culture. Among his books are Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity, and a translation of Confucius’s Analects. His new book is Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Minescape Podcast.
0:03.4	I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:05.4	Many times here on Minescape we've had issues that dealt with philosophy, right?
0:09.3	Either explicitly about philosophy or talking about biology or physics or politics in a
0:14.3	way that involved philosophy.
0:15.8	But almost always, the kinds of philosophy that we talked about were based on the western
0:20.5	tradition of philosophy.
0:22.0	The tradition goes back to the ancient Greek, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, people like that.
0:27.2	We all know that's not the only tradition out there.
0:30.6	It is the tradition that I know the most about, for better or for worse.
0:33.8	So it's harder for me to lead an intelligent conversation about other areas.
0:37.9	But for a long time I thought that we should have a good conversation about eastern philosophy,
0:42.6	Chinese philosophy in particular.
0:44.5	There was a very, very active set of schools of philosophy in ancient China about the same
0:49.1	time as Aristotle and his friends were inventing Greek philosophy.
0:53.0	The warring states period in particular was a period where you were inventing new ideas
0:57.5	in Confucianism, Taoism and other kinds of traditions.
1:01.2	So obviously these are huge topics, much too much to talk about in one podcast in any
1:06.5	comprehensive way, but we're going to try to do it anyway.
1:09.7	Today's guest is Edward Slingerland, who was a distinguished university scholar and professor
1:14.4	of philosophy at the University of British Columbia.
1:17.0	So he's an expert in ancient Chinese philosophy.
	...

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