Li Zhi, Confucianism, and the Virtue of Desire

Acknowledgments

ix Acknowledgments Completion of this book gives me the treasured opportunity to express my deep gratitude to the people who have supported, taught, and inspired me through these many years. There are three to whom I owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude, and without whom this book could certainly not have been written. Philip J. Ivanhoe has been, and through time and distance always remains, a steadfast mentor and friend from the first day of my scholarly journey seeking the Dao. I would possibly not be a scholar and without doubt a markedly different one without him. Beata Grant and Robert Hegel, with their distinctive ways of living the Way, are both a ceaseless source of support and guidance; daily I am motivated by the high standards of their scholarship, guided by their wisdom as mentors, and inspired by the depths of their kindness as people. The profound influence of all three is in so many places in my life and work, and certainly everywhere in the following chapters. My friends and colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis— including Ji-Eun Lee, Jamie Newhard, Lingchei Letty Chen, Steven Miles, Nancy Berg, Carl Minzner, Yufeng Mao, Lori Watt, Daniel Bornstein , Beata Grant, and Robert Hegel—create a deeply stimulating and nurturing environment for life and scholarship, and I am grateful. Tony Chang, head of the East Asian Studies library at Washington University in St. Louis, has been most responsive to questions and requests for books. Fatemeh Keshavarz, chair of the department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures, has been a constant source of support and guidance, and I am grateful to her. My students have taught me much and I especially would like to thank Laura Vollmer, Scott Paul McGinnis, Li En, and Mimi Li who have also been my research assistants during different parts of the writing process and have given me much needed aid. x Li Zhi, Confucianism and the Virtue Of Desire I thank much-cherished friends old and new for sharing life and work with me including Shari Epstein, Eric Hutton, Reiko Shinno, Zwia Lipkin, De-nin Lee, David DeCosse, and Jennifer Kapcynzski. I am deeply grateful to David Wang for the countless treasured ways he gives and has given to me through the many years. Eric Brown, David DeCosse, Eric Hutton, and Ma Zhao generously read through different chapters of my manuscript giving me invaluable comments. Aaron Stalnaker read through the entire manuscript and provided remarkably nuanced, thoughtful, and stimulating feedback absolutely critical to my rewriting process. Tao Jiang has been there to answer my endless questions during the writing process. I thank Erin Cline for inviting me to participate in a conference on “Confucian Virtues at Work” at the University of Oregon in 2008, and Justin Tiwald for including me in a conference on “Neo-Confucian Moral Psychology” at the 2009 Pacific American Philosophical Association; I received such thoughtful responses and questions to my talks, especially from Mark Unno and Yang Xiao, respectively, that were critical to the writing of my conclusion. I thank Steven Owyoung and Margaret Lee for generously taking the time to help me find just the right patch of beautiful peonies for this book cover design. I am grateful for such a rich, stimulating, and nurturing scholarly community. I would like to thank Diane Ganeles and Nancy Ellegate for steering me through the intricacies of the book production process, and sharing the excitement as the manuscript passed through the various stages. This book little resembles but began as a doctoral dissertation at Stanford University, and I would like to thank those who first taught and guided me in my work: Carl Bielefeldt, Hester Gelber, the late Susan Moller Okin, Lee H. Yearley, Shao Dongfang, the late Julius Moravcsik, and especially Philip J. Ivanhoe. An earlier version of Chapter Three is forthcoming as “‘There is nothing more than . . . dressing and eating’: Li Zhi 李贄 and the childlike heart-mind (tong xin 童心),” in Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy , v. 11, n. 1, spring 2012. An earlier version of sections found in Chapter Two and Chapter Five is forthcoming as “‘Spewing Jade and Spitting Pearls’: Li Zhi’s Ethics of Genuineness,” in Journal of Chinese Philosophy , supplement to v. 38, December 2011. I thank both journals for giving me permission to republish the respective articles. My daughter Nadya, who arrived into this world when I first started to write my book, has brought into my life such great wonder...