Worries in My Heart: Defending the Significance of You for Confucian Moral Cultivation

While the conversations surrounding moral cultivation in Confucianism often focus on the debate regarding the starting point of moral learning (and corresponding features of the learning process) that is inspired by the disagreements between the Mengzi and the Xunzi,(1) there is another group of scholarship on moral cultivation which tends to the experiential qualities felt by the learning agents.(2) This essay participates in the latter group of scholarship. The majority of discussions regarding the learning experience center around mental states such as an (tranquility or equanimity) and le (happiness, joy, or pleasure) of a special kind. There is, nonetheless, a minor trend that emphasizes the significance of you (worry or distress). In this essay, I raise attention to the significance of you and argue that in the Analects, an indispensable and significant part of Confucian moral cultivation is to learn to worry well, which involves learning to worry broadly about society in general, and to worry deeply about particular individuals standing in important relationship to us.