Herbert Fingarette

(1921 - 2018)

Confucius: The Secular as Sacred by philosopher Herbert Fingarette was a milestone in the study of the ancient Chinese sage Confucius when it was published fifty years ago, and it remains required reading for anyone interested in Chinese or comparative philosophy today. This modern classic of Confucian interpretation by Fingarette, one of the most eminent philosophers of his day, sparked an intellectual revolution and has inspired generations of sinologists since its publication. While remaining scrupulously faithful to the text of the Analects of Confucius, the book discerns the deepest meaning of Confucius' thought and examines its application to the present day. By exploring the Analects, Fingarette invites us to reconsider what makes life worth living. As one scholar has noted, it is as if Fingarette holds a magical key to the profound insights of Confucius. As Fingarette said in his Preface, "Confucius can be a teacher to us today... He tells us things not being said elsewhere; things needing to be said. He has a new lesson to teach." Confucius: The Secular as Sacred succeeds, as few books do, to recall us to our humanity. Readers will leave the book changed by it"--Publisher's description.

With a new chapter This new edition of Herbert Fingarette's classic study in philosophical psychology now includes a provocative recent essay on the topic by the author. A seminal work, the book has deeply influenced the fields of philosophy, ethics, psychology, and cognitive science, and it remains an important focal point for the large body of literature on self-deception that has appeared since its publication. How can one deceive oneself if the very idea of deception implies that the deceiver knows the truth? The resolution of this paradox leads Fingarette to fundamental insights into the mind at work. He questions our basic ideas of self and the unconscious, personal responsibility and our ethical categories of guilt and innocence. Fingarette applies these ideas to the philosophies of Sartre and Kierkegaard, as well as to Freud's psychoanalytic theories and to contemporary research into neurosurgery. Included in this new edition, Fingarette's most recent essay, "Self-Deception Needs No Explaining (1998)," challenges the ideas in the extant literature.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ProvocationsHerbert Fingarette (bio)Our Other LifeWe live, each of us, two interconnected lives. One we respect and take seriously. The other we dismiss as fantastical, accidental, and wholly unreal. I refer here, of course, to our waking life and our dream life.My concern with the dream life is not the one that has occasional popularity—the dream as the embodiment of rather arcane symbols which decipher into messages about our deep unconscious life. Freud and others who have interpreted dreams in this way may have a point. But in any case it is not the point I want to make here.What is a dream, after all? It is an experience, an experience we live through. Often it has an intensity that surpasses the intensity with which we live our waking experience. Often the experience embodies flights of fantasy and imagination that are both amazing and wholly untypical of our experience in waking life.Whence come these startling, fantastic situations that we live when asleep? There is only one possible answer, the obvious one. They come from us. The dreamer is the creator. If there is amazing novelty, it is the dreamer whose imagination has created this.The dream-life is an often powerful, evocative, imaginative world which we create and in which we live a substantial part of our life. Why do we dismiss it?One obvious reason, perhaps the sole and only necessary reason, is that what happens in the dream is disconnected with the structure and content of our waking life. We view it as "unreal," and refer to waking life as "real" life.Yet a moment's reconsideration reveals that both of these lives are "real," they really happen, we really experience them. The difference lies not in their reality but in the seeming incompatibility of the two. What happens in the dream is not consistently continued when we wake. Moreover the way things happen in a dream is often strikingly different from the way they happen when we're awake. In my dream I am in one place, and then instantaneously in a very distant place. The person I dream is my mother but also my grown daughter, and yet at the next moment my daughter at a childhood age. [End Page 861]I live exciting, fearful, and strange situations in which I am being attacked. Such things have never happened in my waking life. I dream that I'm a professor who realizes he is grossly late for his class, and can't remember what the assignment was or what I am to lecture on. In my waking life I am also a professor, but I've rarely been late for class, and never have forgotten the assignment or the lecture material.Yes, there is at times an obvious connection—my role as professor, the identity of someone as my mother or daughter. But what happens, and the way it happens in one life are dramatically unlike and disconnected with the other life.Why should I dismiss my dream life? It constitutes a goodly portion of my total life. I live it. I feel it, I react emotionally. It reveals an extraordinarily free and intense imagination that I largely fail to use when awake. What if the question were put to one, but without context or prejudgments: Which life would you find more interesting, challenging, exciting—day life or dream life? Try to think about that question in its own terms, without bias.Am I proposing something contrary to human nature? Not at all. We know there are cultures ("primitive?") in which dream life is viewed as an important, meaningful dimension of one's existence. We in the contemporary Western world are the exceptions. We dismiss this other life of ours. As a result, we fail to fully appreciate it in its own right.Indeed, as I've said, there are often connections. One needs no arcane theory of unconscious symbols to recognize this in my professorial dream. My embarrassing dream life as an unprepared professor is obviously related to my quasi-obsessive concern when awake to be prompt and thoroughly prepared. Clearly, in this regard, my two lives form a...