Confucius’ Embodied Knowledge

The Analects, a foundational text of Chinese philosophy, contains themes that align closely with modern embodiment theory (ET), including embodiment, embeddedness, enactment, extendedness, emotivity, implicitness, emergence, joy, and apprenticeship or self-cultivation. While recent Sinological research has addressed embodiment, explicit connections to ET have been rare. The article argues that ET offers a useful framework for interpreting key themes in the Analects, and conversely, that engaging with the Chinese philosophical tradition—which has discussed embodiment for over two millennia—could enrich ET's further development.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The main purpose of the present article is to explicitly link the Analects to the embodiment theory (ET). As indicated in the introduction, embodiment has been an important topic in recent Sinological research, but until now rather few explicit connections have been made with the ET. In relation to the embodied knowledge, the article discusses the following topics: embodiment, embeddedness, enactment, extendedness, emotivity, implicitness, emergence, joy and apprenticeship or self-cultivation. The same themes are found to be important in the Analects, with a plethora of examples. Arguably ET could thus be a useful paradigm for discussing several important themes of the Analects. And the Analects being one of the founding texts of the Chinese philosophical tradition (though similar concerns are manifest also in other texts), it could also be beneficial to further developments in the ET itself, on the condition that its proponents familiarize themselves with the Chinese philosophical tradition where important issues of ET have been explicitly discussed for two and a half millennia.