New on the website of the Social Science Research Council, the interview I did last winter with David Kyuman Kim, a philosopher of religion who grapples with political agency, race, identity, and virtue. He’s also an incredibly gracious person who I’ve been very priviledged to work with at the SSRC. Central to both his work and his way of life is the challenge of claiming traditions as one’s own:
In graduate school, I studied with the eminent scholar of Confucianism Tu Weiming. I used to refer to him as the original Confucian evangelical. He travels the world arguing for the revival of Confucianism as a living tradition. A critical moment came for me when I took a moral reasoning class with him. At some point I realized, “My goodness, I’m a Confucian!” I had been raised as a Confucian without being called a Confucian. All the categories of piety and reciprocity, the devotion to ritual, right practices, and certain kinds of respect—these were practices and ideas that I had always been living. Finding a moral and religious vocabulary is a very powerful experience. It’s a sign of moral maturity to be able to say: “I have this intellectual identity, I have this spiritual identity, I have this moral identity, all of which place me in a lineage, in a genealogy, in a tradition that’s bigger than me as an individual.”
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3 responses to “Agency as a Vocation”
What a great surprise! I studied the “discontents of modernity” with David Kyuman Kim in the fall of 2002 – my introduction to Kant, Weber, William James, and even Du Bois. I haven’t grappled with those genealogies/lineages recently, especially since I took up policy on mentally ill prisoners. It may be too nitty-gritty, but I wonder how philosophers concerned with the expression of agency and freedom would respond to the obscene U.S. phenomenon of mass incarceration.
That use of the word “agency” troubles me.
“I have this intellectual identity, I have……….” This also troubles me some because done too well it can be a closing of one’s mind………Q
I think there’s something to what you’re saying, for sure. But I think he’d have other things to say on the matter. What he’s speaking against, here, is a sense of rootlessness, a failure to draw from the rich springs that tradition can offer.
Doing so, always, will require judiciousness. A willingness to choose between the good of a tradition and the false constraints it might tempt one to take on. I think this care is what David means by “agency.”