Research on the Ethical Ideas in Folk Tales - Taking the Texts of Gengcun Stories as the Object

Author: Zhou Fuyan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-03-01
Features: This book, guided by the theory of folkloric form, employs deconstructive reading methods to explore the everyday ethical concepts embedded in the text of Geng Village stories. To present these concepts as an interdependent system, the article describes and summarizes the moral issues and phenomena reflected in the stories from three perspectives: society, family, and religion. The author finds that folk ethical thought exhibits a highly critical nature. The tendency to oppose ethical expectations such as "filial piety," "righteousness," and "fortune" also exists in the collective consciousness, creating sharp contradictions. Specifically, folk social ethics is marked by the conflict between "righteousness" and "unrighteousness," family ethics by the conflict between "filial piety" and "unfilial piety," and religious ethics by the conflict between "doing good" and "seeking fortune." These conflicts are products of the traditional elite hierarchical social structure and also represent the vulgarized form of Confucian ethical thought permeating into the daily lives of the masses. Beyond sharing the relative and particularistic features with orthodox Confucian ethics, folk ethics is characterized by a distinct direct utilitarianism. However, it does not lead to genuine utilitarianism (i.e., ethical universalism) but rather to ethical egoism. As a baseline morality, folk ethics remains firmly within the boundaries of daily life and does not constitute an heresy to orthodox thought. Consequently, it cannot serve as a force to ultimately subvert the established social order.