{"id":47316,"date":"2019-04-14T01:00:37","date_gmt":"2019-04-14T05:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=47316"},"modified":"2019-03-11T15:27:59","modified_gmt":"2019-03-11T19:27:59","slug":"qotd-sun-tzu-isnt-your-life-coach-and-confucius-never-said-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/04\/14\/qotd-sun-tzu-isnt-your-life-coach-and-confucius-never-said-that\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Sun Tzu isn&#8217;t your life coach and Confucius never said that"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Popular uses of East Asian philosophies often tend this way: toward making the circumscribed expansive, toward making small wisdoms carry water for all the wisdom. This is how the ancient military theorist Sun Tzu might end up guiding your retirement savings, coaching your kid\u2019s football team, improving your marriage, or even raising your kids. Sun Tzu\u2019s <em>Art of War<\/em> has been leveraged into self-help advice on all of these subjects and more. Superficially, and also for trained scholars of early Chinese military history, it might seem that Sun Tzu is in fact only really interested in managing violent conflict well. But at a deeper level \u2013 which is to say, at the level of what might be marketed to gullible Western consumers \u2013 he is actually addressing all of life\u2019s mysteries. What reads like straightforward instruction on wartime espionage might yet have something to teach us about our children. To access this deeper meaning, we need to assume that \u2018oriental\u2019 wisdom is never about this or that, but always about everything. And importantly, at root, it is reassuring.<\/p>\n<p>Worse than the bizarre uses of Sun Tzu are the seemingly endless heartwarming and encouraging things that Confucius is claimed to have said. Blandly inspirational Confucius memes are now so numerous and so detached from reality that they have spawned a meta-meme, one that reads: \u2018Confucius: I never said all that shit.\u2019 Most of the memes detailing what Confucius \u2018said\u2019 say little that is compelling or even mildly interesting. But that is exactly why it\u2019s so important to append \u2018Confucius said\u2019 to them. Without this addendum, bracing us to receive a bit of \u2018Eastern wisdom\u2019, we might believe them to be yet more dull mini-homilies. Which, to be clear, they are. Poor old Confucius features in these memes as a mystical oriental kitten, telling us all to <em>hang in there!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Amy Olberding, <a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/ideas\/tidying-up-is-not-joyful-but-another-misuse-of-eastern-ideas\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Tidying up is not joyful but another misuse of Eastern ideas&#8221;, <em>Aeon<\/em><\/a>, 2019-02-18.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Popular uses of East Asian philosophies often tend this way: toward making the circumscribed expansive, toward making small wisdoms carry water for all the wisdom. This is how the ancient military theorist Sun Tzu might end up guiding your retirement savings, coaching your kid\u2019s football team, improving your marriage, or even raising your kids. Sun [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,22,28,41],"tags":[947,576,593],"class_list":["post-47316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-china","category-media","category-quotations","tag-mysticism","tag-philosophy","tag-socialmedia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-cja","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47316"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47317,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47316\/revisions\/47317"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}