豈敢毀傷
qǐ gǎn huǐ shāng
"How could one dare to harm it?"
"How dare you do as you see fit with your body? Your parents gave you that flesh! You have to look after it, or you'll be a disgrace to your family." - Confucian strawman, c. 500 CE
My days of heedless self-destruction are pretty much over, and I've come to appreciate the value of taking care of oneself ("take refuge in clean living," as Grails might say, though my living ain't exactly fully clean), but I still think folks have a right to bodily autonomy. This autonomy can manifest in some incredibly selfish or misguided ways that I don't agree with at all—anti-vaxxer bullshit, for example—but when the alternative is letting tradition, gerontocracy, and hollow moralizing dictate terms, I gotta side with allowing people do what they want with their future corpses. Of course, it's not that simple: human beings, while capable of rational behavior that benefits self and other, are not actually all that rational, and make decisions about themselves based on all kinds of faulty premises. Those decisions, regardless of the logic behind them, impact others, and expressions of autonomy (e.g., the aforementioned anti-vax nonsense) wind up fucking over a lot of people.
I'd be more amenable to Confucian arguments about self-care if they weren't oriented towards maintaining a conservative, patriarchal social order. I'm about to start delving into other Chinese philosophical schools, so I hope to encounter something that provides an ethical framework as devoid of supernatural elements as Confucianism, but without the tired-ass hierarchy.
This line is the one I meant when, in the post on line 37, I said the 孝經 Classic of Filial Piety would turn up again.
豈 is a great character that marks a statement as not only rhetorical, but implies that it couldn't be otherwise at all. Whenever I see the character, I can't help but see two distinct elements, 山 and 豆: a mountain atop a bean, or maybe a hill of beans, neither of which is a meaningful reading at all. And that, 看倌, is why I am not a linguist or paleographer, but just some dude who's into classical Chinese.
微臣
史大偉
No comments:
Post a Comment