303 DOI: 10.4312/as.2019.7.2.303-306
Geir Sigurðsson: Confucian Propriety and Ritual Learning: A 
Philosophical Interpretation 
(2015. SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State Uni-
versity of New Y ork Press. 177 pages. Hardcover ISBN 978-1-4384-5441-2.)
Reviewed by Jana S. ROŠKER
∗5
The study of rituals has been important in many different academic disciplines, 
because they are most often understood as formal procedures, which facilitate the 
fusion of rational and sensitive elements within the human psyche. The contem -
porary Chinese philosopher Li Zehou describes them as important social tech -
niques, which lead at the level of external standardisation to the rational internal -
isation of regulations that determine human behaviour. In other words, they are 
significant tools for the rationalisation of collective demands and purposes and to 
the integration of social ethics. Due to such integral procedures, rituals have led 
to the formation of the essence of being human.
If we consider the central role of ethics in the Chinese philosophy, it is not sur -
prising that the concept li 禮, which is most often translated into English with 
terms such as rituality or ritual propriety, also belongs to the crucial notions of 
the Chinese, and especially Confucian, ideational tradition. In the context of the 
presently very fashionable Confucian revival, we have been inundated with by all 
kinds of Confucian studies. However, most investigations of the ancient Con -
fucian tradition from over the past three decades have neglected or ignored the 
important historical phenomenon of the establishment of ritual institutions and 
the significant philosophical grounds on which they were based. As Sigurðsson 
explains in the “Introduction” (p. 17), Confucian rituality is often still seen as a rel -
ic of some of the most archaic and conservative aspects of the Chinese tradition.
What sparkled Geir Sigurðsson’s interest in the issue of the Confucian notion of 
li, was therefore his first intuitive insight into the fact that there must be some -
thing more important hidden beyond such superficial understandings (or preju -
dices), and underlying the genuine tradition of this important Confucian concept. 
In this interesting and valuable book, he shows why and how we should rather 
look upon it as an important guideline for socialisation, which can lead people 
through the opaque jungle of ethical and social dilemmas towards their own, most 
* Jana S. ROŠKER, Professor of Sinology, Department of Asian Studies,  
Faculty of Arts, Univeristy of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
 Email address: jana.rosker@ff.uni-lj.si
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304 Book Reviews
intimate humanness, or towards that which makes human beings human. The 
book also demonstrates how in the course of these transformations, the Confu -
cian ritual moves from experience to the transcendental, from habit, tradition, and 
education to a common mindset. 
Even though the book was published more than three years ago, it is still quite 
topical and remains unsurpassed. The Outstanding Book Award, which was pre -
sented to it last year by the Society of Professors of Education, was therefore well 
deserved and not surprising. In this work, Geir Sigurðsson reconstructs the mean -
ing, role and manifold significance of the Confucian rituality by considering the 
spatial and temporal context of the present situation. This does not only mean that 
he wants to elaborate upon the question of what can Confucian rituality “still” of -
fers to the present, and to select those elements of this rich classical tradition that 
could prove themselves to be most “useful” and “worthwhile” for such endeavours. 
It rather means that the author aims to offer the readers his own, often quite top -
ical philosophical insights created upon the inspirational foundations of classical 
Confucian texts. In this context, he proposes a reconsideration of the notion Li, 
which is among the most controversial concepts in Confucian thought. 
At the beginning of his book, the author points out (p. 12) that while ritual ( li 
禮) is one of Confucius’s most discussed notions and an integral component of 
the entire Confucian tradition, the term itself does not owe its origins to the 
Confucians. This is not surprising, for rituals belong to the earliest forms of hu -
man spiritual civilisation and symbolic production. In China, they go back to the 
royal families of the first three Chinese dynasties and were only later expanded, 
deepened, and modified in a multiplicity of ways by Confucius and his followers 
and commentators up until the present day. On this basis, the author highlights 
the fact that in the pre-Qin Confucianism, ritual became an important source of 
establishing moral psychology and spirituality. In the following chapters, the book 
documents on several levels that this fact is clearly reflected in numerous classical 
works of this dominant stream of thought. The author shows that in the original 
Confucian teachings li’s role cannot be reduced to the agenda of returning to the 
ancient tradition of the early Zhou Dynasty. It rather aims to revive its vital force 
and to inspire people to actively partake in the further development and evolution 
of this stimulating tradition. In this respect, Confucian rituality manifests itself 
in an “endeavour to continue forging the path that constitutes the tradition, to 
continue making the tradition—for without such an endeavour, the tradition runs 
the risk of becoming a thing of the past, a dead tradition” (p. 31). Here, it has to 
be noted that it is precisely this “traditionalism,” i.e. this positive evaluation of its 
past offerings to humankind, which leads many contemporary scholars to criticise 
Confucian rituality and its alleged “obsession” with propriety as outmoded and 
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305 Asian Studies VII (XXIII), 2 (2019), pp. 303–306
even reactionary. Against this background, the author critically questions the in -
strumental rationality that was brought about by global modernisation processes 
and references in this context several important theoretical works of modern and 
contemporary Western philosophical and sociological production. Besides, the 
Chinese classics are in this work often examined in dialogue with both Chinese 
and Western interpreters and the most influential theoreticians. 
The main body of the book is structured into three main chapters or “assemblag -
es,” dealing (roughly described) with Confucian rituality and propriety through 
the lens of the problems linked to 
• traditions and the concept of time, 
• the concept of reason or “the reasonable” (in the sense of a dialectic relation -
ship between ritual and the sense of the appropriate), and
• education as personal cultivation, internalisation of skills and values, and 
humanisation.
These three parts eventually flow into the “Concluding Remarks,” where Sigurðs -
son, among other issues, exposes the importance of being appropriate, not only for 
people living in the Confucian tradition, but even in a much more general sense, 
namely for all people living in human society. The attitude of propriety requires 
self-cultivation, which is, of course, a lifelong never-ending process, constantly 
and continuously directed towards an ethical awareness and individual integrity: 
“Tradition and culture must be continuously revised and reinterpreted in light of 
the novel circumstances arising in the ongoing transformation to which we refer 
as ‘reality’.” (p. 121)
In the first part of the book, Sigurðsson exposes the dynamic, flexible and adapt -
able nature of the Confucian concept li by illustrating it against the background 
of the specific Chinese conceptualisation of time and continuous change. These 
issues have been studied in detail by the narrow circles of Sinological and Chinese 
academia, but are doubtless of great interest for Western readers who are not ex -
perts in the specific paradigms of Chinese thought.  
In the second chapter, he argues against the constricted ideas of the allegedly 
irrational nature of tradition that have arisen at the edge of European modernity. 
In contrast to such ideas, based upon an artificially constructed and allegedly ab -
solute dichotomy of “rational enlightenment” and “irrational indoctrination” (see, 
for instance, p. 52), the author shows how Confucian rituality could teach us to 
become more “reasonable,” i.e., more open to––and, at the same time, more mor -
ally aware of––the diverse particularities of the situations in which we find our -
selves. In such a form of rituality, ethics and morality become the individual’s own 
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306 Book Reviews
self-conscious understanding of the meaning of life, value and his or her ultimate 
concerns.
In the third assembly, Geir Sigurðsson elaborates upon the role of education in 
the context of the Confucian rituality and propriety. He shows that in this respect, 
education is mainly seen as a tool for personal growth (in the sense of Bildung, pp. 
81–83). He also points out the importance of the relation between ritual knowl -
edge and aesthetic education, revealing hereby why it is important that the rituals 
must always be personalised. On such grounds, the role of Confucian rituality in 
the field of personal cultivation becomes more apparent and much more under -
standable. Hence, it becomes very clear why in the world of Confucian propriety 
education lies at the root of human existence. In the world of li, being human 
always means learning to be human. This becomes also apparent in the archaic 
mother tongue of Geir Sigurðsson, the Icelandic language, in which the word for 
education, menntun, is derived from the etymological meaning of “being human” 
(p. 84). In the endless change of our human societies, being human is always nec -
essarily linked to the notion of becoming human, which is a never-ending process 
in which people can actively mould and shape new images and conditions of real -
ity. On such grounds, the author successfully shows that both propriety and ritual 
learning as such are tightly linked to the issues of humanness. Hence, on could 
conclude that they are still of utmost importance as a precious tool which helps 
us in valuing ourselves and our fellow human beings in spite of all difficulties we 
encounter (and create) in today’s strange world.
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