Research on the Ethical Ideas of Folklore: Taking the Texts of Geng Village Stories as the Object

Author: None
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-02
Features: This book, guided by the theory of folk form discourse, employs deconstructive reading methods to explore the 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 aspects: society, family, and religion. The author finds that folk ethical thought exhibits a highly significant didactic nature. The tendency to completely oppose the ethical expectations of "filial piety," "righteousness," and "fortune" also exists in the folk psyche, creating a sharp conflict between the two. Specifically, in social ethics, there is a contradiction between "righteousness" and "unrighteousness"; in family ethics, there is a conflict between "filial piety" and "unfilial piety"; and in religious ethics, there is a 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 after it permeated the daily lives of the people. Folk ethics, apart from sharing the relative and particularistic characteristics with orthodox Confucian ethics, also possesses 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 has not yet transcended the boundaries of daily life. It does not constitute an heresy of orthodox thought and thus cannot become the ultimate force of the established social order.