Rethinking Ignorance Through Confucianism and Daoism: Propriety, Transcendence, and Their Educational Implications

Abstract

Ignorance has been seen as negative in the mainstream philosophical narrative and knowledge-based society. This study introduces Chinese epistemic traditions of Confucianism and Daoism as resources to reunderstand ignorance and current educational issues. Guided by hermeneutic openness, this study fuses ancient epistemic and modern educational horizons by reinterpreting early Confucian and Daoist classics. The boundary between ignorance and knowledge is flexible and blurry in Confucianism and Daoism, and ignorance is distinctively understood as Confucian admissible propriety and Daoist transcendence of conventional knowledge. Rooted in these epistemologies, Confucianism and Daoism have developed unique educational ideas and forms— congyou (从游) and zuowang (坐忘)—which advocate moral socialization and self-reflexivity beyond knowing through language. These traditions inspire today's educators and learners to find more space for self-formation, appropriate forgetting, and illuminating intuition in education. As an initial exploration, this study examines potential nonnegative ignorance and its educational implications in Confucian and Daoist wisdom. The findings are instructive for rethinking today's knowledge-based society and the text-oriented education of Chinese culture and can contribute to world epistemic diversity and cultural interactions.