I got the idea for this course the most scholarly, academic way possible: by binge-watching a fantasy TV show for eight year olds. The show’s use of East Asian thought prompted me to open up the copy of the Daodejing that had been sitting on my shelf since a friend gave it to me in high school. I was hooked. After that, I read Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden’s Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, using Van Norden’s Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy as a guide. I found that the two books paired beautifully and began to sketch a course that introduced Chinese philosophy to non-philosophers using those two books. Three years later, I was given the opportunity to teach Ethics, and the faculty at Loyola were supportive of the idea of a course on comparative Chinese and Western ethics.
This course is intended for non-majors, and fulfills the general ethics requirement at my institution. It focuses on Chinese thought while also introducing Western philosophy. This kind of course has advantages and challenges of its own, distinct from courses on non-Western thought for majors and graduate students. Gen Ed courses allow Chinese thought to be taught to non-majors, helping to normalize Asian philosophy and spark interest in philosophy from potential majors, whether because of their own background or because of interest in Asian culture.
One particular challenge was motivating in the more culturally distinct aspects of Chinese thought, such as the emphasis on ritual and tradition in Confucianism. To illustrate the Confucian thinker Xunzi’s view that ritual paradoxically helps channel emotion, I performed a mini-concert on the flute, showing how “ritualistic” aspects of music, like rhythm, contribute to its affective power, and how ignoring rhythm and playing a piece merely in response to one’s own feelings about it actually weakens the piece, dissipating rather than enhancing emotional response. To motivate Confucian emphasis on tradition, we watched a documentary on about traditional baking. Students paid close attention to the way sourdough and whole wheat enhance the nutritional quality of bread, and how industrial food production in the early 20thcentury removed those benefits before we even understood the chemistry behind them. After I told them that that is how Confucians view tradition and innovation, you could see the lightbulbs flickering on.
I love how this course makes students comfortable sharing their own cultural background. For example, the readings prompted students from Korean and Taiwanese families to share how what they read resonated (or did not resonate!) with their own upbringing. Since I am not from an Asian background, I invited those students to teach the rest of the class when the readings touched on aspects of culture they understood better than I did. This wasn’t limited to Asian students, either: students from the US and Mexico shared their experience growing up Catholic, and students from Nigeria and Ghana talked about wedding rituals and views of the supernatural in their own cultures.
In the first iteration of the course, I had students read chapters from both the Introduction and Readings volumes, as I did when teaching myself Chinese philosophy. This turned out to be way too much reading! In my second draft of the syllabus, I cut out the Introduction readings in order to focus on primary texts. I still use the Introduction as a guide for writing lectures and a source of ideas for reading questions, and I recommend this to anyone who want to use my syllabus.
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Jacob J. Andrews
Jacob J. Andrews is a PhD candidate at Loyola University Chicago. He received his MA from Marquette and MPhil from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. His dissertation is on early 13th century epistemology. He grew up in Chicago and currently lives in Wheaton, Illinois with his wife and son.
