Abhilash G Nath

Confucianism, a way of life taught by Confucius in the 6th–5th century B.C.E., is considered along with Taoism and Chinese Buddhism as one of the three pillars of Chinese civilisation. It is, in fact, an outcome of 2500 years of the Chinese experience. Over time, elements adapted from Buddhism and Taoism have transformed Confucian practices from within to more like a religion than a way of life. Confucian teachings nevertheless have deeply touched all aspects of Chinese life, whether inter-personal relationships, customs, rituals, or ethics. The influence of Confucian culture is a significant factor in the rapid industrialisation of East Asia after the II World War. It played an essential role in the growth of a less adversarial, less individualistic, and less self‐interested modern civilisation. It has opened up ways to cultivate a sense of self-dignity, established not in isolation (as is the case of an adventure of the cogito) but constantly evolving via a network of interconnections and relationships. Its core principles and values, such as a sense of humanity, justice, equity, civility, wisdom, trust, and loyalty, have, over time, became dynamic everyday sensibilities. Diffused via a dense supply of famous sayings of Confucius and his followers, writings, folktales, myths, and symbols laid by over more than two millennia of the Chinese and East-Asian experience, these ancient values organise words and actions, shaping subtly all aspects of everyday life in what we today call East Asia. The present study tries to understand the worldview associated with Confucianism and examines the concept of “order” in relation to its three timeless truths – the concept of time, the relativistic worldview, and the clan.

In Foucault, thought is spatial, and unfolds within the density of becoming, in the void that separates the subject and the object. It is ontologically independent from the authority of the contemplating self, the ‘I’. Thought is a being of its own, and comes from the outside – the world of relationships. The present study poses to itself the following question: if thinking indeed comes from the outside, then under what condition thinking can encounter itself – its colour, texture and topography? That is, under what condition can man encounter himself and the world? Since this problem does not have its origin in Foucault’s work, this work does not arrive at any conclusion merely by analysing and evaluating his work alone. Rather, it aims to explore how Foucault has incorporated Kant and Nietzsche into his thinking, on the one hand, and contextualises him within the Western tradition in general and his responses to contemporaries Deleuze and Derrida, in particular, on the other. Consequently, this study is limited by the sheer weight of its own problematisation. However, the problem of ‘under what condition thought encounters itself?’ is here posed not for the sake of constituting a form of knowledge on it, but rather, it is asked from the point of view of ethics. This, in fact, demands a reordering of the forms of ontology that Foucault has developed at different stages of his career. There are three forms of ontology in Foucault’s work: the first analyses man as the subject of truth; the second takes up man as the subject of power; and the third analyses man as an ethical being. The present study reverses the order and examines his work in its totality from the standpoint of his later writings that deal with the problem of truth and ethics. It tries to connect two problems that pop up at different stages of Foucault’s career. The Order of Things asks the question, “what is man?” and in his later writings Foucault labours on the question, “how should I live my life?” This study tries to relate these two questions, as it unfolds itself.