| This dissertation describes early Confucian attitudes toward preventable and unpreventable failures of ritual in the Liji. It argues that early Confucians often found an ambiguous distinction between the two; and that this ambiguity gives way to a tragic reading of ritual theory.;In contrast to the dominant position of contemporary scholars this project demonstrates that early Confucian texts can be read as arguments for ambiguity in ritual failure. If, as discussed in one text, Confucius builds a tomb for his parents unlike the tombs of antiquity, and rains fall causing the tomb to collapse, it is not immediately clear whether this failure was the result of random misfortune or the result of Confucius straying from the ritual script by building a tomb incongruent with those of antiquity. The Liji poses several of these situations and suggests that the line between preventable and unpreventable failures of ritual is not always clear. These vignettes also demonstrate that happiness and human flourishing is, to a certain extent, contingent on agencies other than the self. Relationships between oneself and other human beings, for instance, partially constitute the self and thereby leave the self permeable to the intrusion of those relations.;Ritual performance, in this view, is a performance of risk. It entails rendering oneself vulnerable to the agency of others; and resigning oneself to the need to vary from the successful rituals of past, thereby moving into untested and uncertain territory. This theory of ritual is tragic in the sense that it explores how Confucians coped with the dissonance between an understanding of ritual where ritual served to construct an ordered world and their experience with ritual as it sometimes failed to bring about this world. This dissertation demonstrates that the anxiety associated with notions of dissonance and vulnerability functioned 'productively'. In other words, the anxiety associated with the inevitability and ambiguity of ritual failure, as well as the anxiety associated with the contingent nature of successful ritual generated a profoundly meaningful series of opportunities valued for their creative and therapeutic power in responding to the complex circumstances they confronted in life. |
