Some of the texts are indeed very popular, but one of my concerns is that they’re often read according to our stereotypes. They are often thought of as “traditional” ideas, focused on teaching us to accord with the world as it is, as opposed to what we like to call “modern” ideas that are focused on liberating us as individuals to decide for ourselves how to live. So-called Confucianism, for example, is read as simply being about forcing people to accept their social roles, while so-called Taoism is about harmonizing with the larger natural world. So Confucianism is often presented as bad and Taoism as good. But in neither case are we really learning from them.

Image Michael Puett Credit... Margaret Lampert

They come across as exotic and foreign.

Precisely. They’ve become simply foreign and exotic, made into things that we have nothing to learn from.

Is there another risk? That these ideas could be reduced to self-help tips?

A key idea of the book is precisely to oppose that. If we want to take these ideas seriously, we shouldn’t domesticate them to our own way of thinking. When we read them as self-help, we are assuming our own definition of the self and then simply picking up pieces of these ideas that fit into such a vision. So, for example, people sometimes take Taoism as a way to “help me find myself and live well in the world.” But these ideas are not about looking within and finding oneself. They are about overcoming the self. They are, in a sense, anti-self-help.

What is a key idea in China’s philosophical tradition that challenges contemporary assumptions?

Today, we are often told that our goal should be to look within and find ourselves, and, once we do, to strive to be sincere and authentic to that true self, always loving ourselves and embracing ourselves for who we are. All of this sounds great and is a key part of what we think of as a properly “modern” way to live. But what if we’re, on the contrary, messy selves that tend to fall into ruts and patterns of behavior? If so, the last thing we would want to be doing is embracing ourselves for who we are — embracing, in other words, a set of patterns we’ve fallen into. The goal should rather be to break these patterns and ruts, to train ourselves to interact better with those around us.

If we guide people too much, isn’t it paternalism?

Certainly some strains of Chinese political theory will take this vision of the self — that we tend to fall into patterns of behavior — to argue for a more paternalistic state that will, to use a more recent term, “nudge” us into better patterns. But many of the texts we discuss in the book go the other way, and argue that the goal should be to break us from being such passive creatures — calling on us to do things that break us out of these patterns and allow us to train ourselves to start altering our behavior for the better.