SCAS News - 2 May, 2016
Chinese Philosophy and the Good Life in the New Book by SCAS Long-term Fellow Michael Puett
Since 2012, SCAS Long-term Fellow Michael J. Puett teaches one of the most popular undergraudate
courses at Harvard, on Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory. The course introduces the work
and ideas of ancient Chinese philosophers, from Confucius to Zhuangzi, showing how their ideas can
guide you on the path to a good life today. Resulting from this course is Puett's latest book The Path:
What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life (The Path: A New
Way to Think About
Everything) (2016). The book is written by Puett together with journalist and author Christine
Gross-Loh
and has recently been published by Simon & Schuster, among others.
Michael Puett is Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Harvard College Professor at
Harvard
University. He is also a Non-resident Long-term Fellow for Programmes in Anthropological and Historical
Sciences
and the Languages and Civilizations of East Asia at SCAS, and has been in residence at the
Collegium for shorter periods of time recurrently in recent years.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
"For the first time an award-winning Harvard professor shares his wildly popular course on classical
Chinese
philosophy, showing you how these ancient ideas can guide you on the path to a good life
today.
Why is a course on ancient Chinese philosophers one of the most popular at Harvard?
It’s because the course challenges all our modern assumptions about what it takes to flourish. This is
why Professor Michael Puett says to his students, “The encounter with these ideas will change your
life.” As one of them told his collaborator, author Christine Gross-Loh, “You can open yourself up to
possibilities you never imagined were even possible.”
These astonishing teachings emerged two thousand years ago through the work of a succession of
Chinese scholars exploring how humans can improve themselves and their society. And what are
these
counterintuitive ideas? Good relationships come not from being sincere and authentic, but
from the
rituals we perform within them. Influence comes not from wielding power but from holding
back.
Excellence comes from what we choose to do, not our natural abilities. A good life emerges not
from
planning it out, but through training ourselves to respond well to small moments. Transformation
comes not from looking within for a true self, but from creating conditions that produce new
possibilities.
In other words, The Path upends everything we are told about how to lead a good life. Above all, unlike
most books on the subject, its most radical idea is that there is no path to follow in the first place—just
a journey we create anew at every moment by seeing and doing things differently.
Sometimes voices
from the past can offer possibilities for thinking afresh about the future."
