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Wong, DB, The Moral Beauty of Harmony in Music, Soup, Society, and State, in Metaphor and Analogy in Chinese Thought Governance within the Person State and Society (January, 2025), pp. 87-132 [doi] .
(last updated on 2026/01/15)
Abstract:
This lecture discusses musical and culinary metaphors of harmony that have an overtly aesthetic dimension to them. Early Confucian thinkers use them to conceptualize and articulate an ideal of harmony. The lecture explains this ideal: it is a conception of harmony that incorporates elements recognizing the need to accommodate disagreement and contest. To discuss how disagreement may be part of harmony without destroying it, the lecture then introduces the notion of accommodation as a value. It brings the Chinese notion of harmony, hé 和, into dialogue with the Greek notion of contest, agon, and further discusses the way that the articulation of the harmony ideal appeals to a kind of motivation that Western philosophy has forgotten about: our sense of moral beauty. Finally, the lecture discusses what relevance ritual and music, central to the Confucian conception of harmony, have not only to contemporary moral cultivation but also to governance.

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			Papers Published Wong, DB, The Moral Beauty of Harmony in Music, Soup, Society, and State, in Metaphor and Analogy in Chinese Thought Governance within the Person State and Society (January, 2025), pp. 87-132 [doi] . (last updated on 2026/01/15) Abstract: This lecture discusses musical and culinary metaphors of harmony that have an overtly aesthetic dimension to them. Early Confucian thinkers use them to conceptualize and articulate an ideal of harmony. The lecture explains this ideal: it is a conception of harmony that incorporates elements recognizing the need to accommodate disagreement and contest. To discuss how disagreement may be part of harmony without destroying it, the lecture then introduces the notion of accommodation as a value. It brings the Chinese notion of harmony, hé 和, into dialogue with the Greek notion of contest, agon, and further discusses the way that the articulation of the harmony ideal appeals to a kind of motivation that Western philosophy has forgotten about: our sense of moral beauty. Finally, the lecture discusses what relevance ritual and music, central to the Confucian conception of harmony, have not only to contemporary moral cultivation but also to governance.