Poetry in Classical Confucianism and Contemporary Narrative Health Practices
Charles Dalrymple-Fraser, University of Toronto
In this presentation, I draw from insights and methodologies in Classical Confucian thought to argue for the importance of poetry in narrative medicine and broader discursive health practices. While discussions of poetry are not necessarily absent in various representations of narrative medicine and its practices, the notion and privileging of a “narrative” conceptualized in a predominantly Western tradition risks excluding other forms of communication as illegitimate or irrelevant to the practices being developed. In particular, discussions around how to treat incoherent narratives, incomplete narratives, and “chaos” narratives, presuppose a certain notion of what a narrative is and serves to accomplish. Furthermore, activist and feminist work has highlighted the ways in which certain populations and individuals are more likely to have their testimonies and communications discounted or ignored due to “incoherence” or “incompleteness”—such as patients with schizophrenia, dementia, communication disorders, chronic pain, sociohistorically marginalized identity groups—for not fitting certain normalized privileged ideals of communication that are supported by and support dominant narrative interpretive practices. By introducing and comparing Classical Confucian treatments of poetry in moral life and personal cultivation against a backdrop of narrative medicine and ethics, I aim to gesture toward a more crossculturally sensitive hermeneutical practice that takes seriously the roles of poetry in our practices, and which more explicitly helps us to draw connections between affect and moral practice in discursive spaces.
I proceed in three main parts. First, I introduce the concepts of narrative medicine and narrative bioethics more generally, and outline the relationships between narrative and ethics, borrowing from Thomas Murray’s (1997) taxonomy of relationships among others. Second, I analyze the use of poetry in Classical Confucian thought, drawing in particular from the use of the Odes (詩) in the pedagogy and arguments in the Analects (論語), as well as excerpts from the Guodian text of the Human Nature Comes From Mandate (性自命出). Throughout this analysis, I explore the relationships between poetry, ethics, and humanness in Classical Confucian traditions and show how it relates to the general treatment of narratives in current medical and bioethical practices. Finally, I relate these findings back to more contemporary poetic styles and contemporary philosophical concerns about meaning and poetry, in order to make suggestions toward more inclusive discursive health practices.
In this presentation, I draw from insights and methodologies in Classical Confucian thought to argue for the importance of poetry in narrative medicine and broader discursive health practices. While discussions of poetry are not necessarily absent in various representations of narrative medicine and its practices, the notion and privileging of a “narrative” conceptualized in a predominantly Western tradition risks excluding other forms of communication as illegitimate or irrelevant to the practices being developed. In particular, discussions around how to treat incoherent narratives, incomplete narratives, and “chaos” narratives, presuppose a certain notion of what a narrative is and serves to accomplish. Furthermore, activist and feminist work has highlighted the ways in which certain populations and individuals are more likely to have their testimonies and communications discounted or ignored due to “incoherence” or “incompleteness”—such as patients with schizophrenia, dementia, communication disorders, chronic pain, sociohistorically marginalized identity groups—for not fitting certain normalized privileged ideals of communication that are supported by and support dominant narrative interpretive practices. By introducing and comparing Classical Confucian treatments of poetry in moral life and personal cultivation against a backdrop of narrative medicine and ethics, I aim to gesture toward a more crossculturally sensitive hermeneutical practice that takes seriously the roles of poetry in our practices, and which more explicitly helps us to draw connections between affect and moral practice in discursive spaces.
I proceed in three main parts. First, I introduce the concepts of narrative medicine and narrative bioethics more generally, and outline the relationships between narrative and ethics, borrowing from Thomas Murray’s (1997) taxonomy of relationships among others. Second, I analyze the use of poetry in Classical Confucian thought, drawing in particular from the use of the Odes (詩) in the pedagogy and arguments in the Analects (論語), as well as excerpts from the Guodian text of the Human Nature Comes From Mandate (性自命出). Throughout this analysis, I explore the relationships between poetry, ethics, and humanness in Classical Confucian traditions and show how it relates to the general treatment of narratives in current medical and bioethical practices. Finally, I relate these findings back to more contemporary poetic styles and contemporary philosophical concerns about meaning and poetry, in order to make suggestions toward more inclusive discursive health practices.