What does it mean to “learn to be human”?

Please join Professor Tu Weiming for this full semester course, archived in the 1990s at Harvard University, in which he puts forward his view of Confucianism as a form of cosmopolitan moral reasoning uniquely adaptable to the needs of the modern world.

Tu Weiming is the most famous Chinese Confucian thinker of the 20th and 21st centuries. Through his decades of study and teaching at Princeton University, the University of California, Harvard University, and the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University, Tu has aimed to renovate and enhance Confucianism through an encounter with Western social theory and Christian theology. From Tu’s perspective, the Confucian ideas of ren (“humaneness” or “benevolence”) and what he calls “anthropocosmic unity” can make powerful contributions to the resolution of issues facing the contemporary world.

Professor Tu’s Confucian project of “learning to be human” is a universal one, conceived as a work of lifelong learning. It is a project for students of any age, culture, or geographic location, and its profoundly humanistic message can be easily received without previous acquaintance with Classical Asian culture.

We warmly recommend this rare recording as an excellent introduction to the Asian roots of the Innermost House idea. This recording of the full course, originally offered at Harvard in 1996, was recovered in June of 2023 by Mary Evelyn Tucker of Yale University, and we wish to thank her for preserving these lectures and making them available to the broader public through the Cultural China Foundation on Youtube.