Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago
Title: Labour, Leisure, and Inner Freedom: How gardening invites philosophy in classical Chinese and European Literature
Speaker: Beth Harper (University of Hong Kong @abouthku)
Title: Labour, Leisure, and Inner Freedom: How gardening invites philosophy in classical Chinese and European Literature
Abstract: There is a long and well-documented history of Chinese and European garden aesthetics. In its focus on the phenomenology of the gardener engaged in gardening, in the act of culture (cultus, cultivation, but also worship), this talk discusses how the encounter between human participant and natural phenomena in the definitionally separate world of the garden invites questions about the role of labour and leisure, freedom and duty, ideology and power in human life. Often set apart from political and social organization, the gardener presents that aspect of human nature which is private and individual and whose highest embodiment may be the poet, or perhaps, the sage. In thinking comparatively, the talk demonstrates how classical Chinese and Latin literature contain poetry about gardening that constitutes a major philosophical language and register of ethical reflection. The gardener is a figure who knows what it might mean to be properly alive and spiritually free. Oppositional to values of utility, service, productivity, efficiency and the violent subjugation of the natural world, these poetic representations transcend state orthodoxy to question the limits of the political in human life. The discourse of cultivating gardens as cultivating the self presents a millennia-long conversation about value and meaning-making within and beyond orthodoxy; ancient China and the Latin West offer mutually illuminating examples for how acts of planting, growing, hewing, pruning, arranging, admiring, worshipping, enjoying the non-human entities of the garden-world can forge the grounds for human authenticity.
Beth Harper is assistant professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. She specializes in premodern European and Chinese literature and thought, with particular interests in tragedy, lyric, ecocriticism, and east-west comparative poetics. Her work has appeared in Shakespeare, English Studies, postmedieval, Comparative Literature: East & West, The Journal of East-West Thought, the Journal of World Literature, and History of Humanities. Current book projects centre child figures and futurity in European tragedy, and classical Chinese and Graeco-Roman theories of leisure, pleasure and the natural world.
#Chinese #philosophy, #chineseliterature, #comparativestudy, #Comparativeliterature, #ComparativePhilosophy, #classicalliterature
Title: Labour, Leisure, and Inner Freedom: How gardening invites philosophy in classical Chinese and European Literature
Speaker: Beth Harper (University of Hong Kong @abouthku)
Title: Labour, Leisure, and Inner Freedom: How gardening invites philosophy in classical Chinese and European Literature
Abstract: There is a long and well-documented history of Chinese and European garden aesthetics. In its focus on the phenomenology of the gardener engaged in gardening, in the act of culture (cultus, cultivation, but also worship), this talk discusses how the encounter between human participant and natural phenomena in the definitionally separate world of the garden invites questions about the role of labour and leisure, freedom and duty, ideology and power in human life. Often set apart from political and social organization, the gardener presents that aspect of human nature which is private and individual and whose highest embodiment may be the poet, or perhaps, the sage. In thinking comparatively, the talk demonstrates how classical Chinese and Latin literature contain poetry about gardening that constitutes a major philosophical language and register of ethical reflection. The gardener is a figure who knows what it might mean to be properly alive and spiritually free. Oppositional to values of utility, service, productivity, efficiency and the violent subjugation of the natural world, these poetic representations transcend state orthodoxy to question the limits of the political in human life. The discourse of cultivating gardens as cultivating the self presents a millennia-long conversation about value and meaning-making within and beyond orthodoxy; ancient China and the Latin West offer mutually illuminating examples for how acts of planting, growing, hewing, pruning, arranging, admiring, worshipping, enjoying the non-human entities of the garden-world can forge the grounds for human authenticity.
Beth Harper is assistant professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. She specializes in premodern European and Chinese literature and thought, with particular interests in tragedy, lyric, ecocriticism, and east-west comparative poetics. Her work has appeared in Shakespeare, English Studies, postmedieval, Comparative Literature: East & West, The Journal of East-West Thought, the Journal of World Literature, and History of Humanities. Current book projects centre child figures and futurity in European tragedy, and classical Chinese and Graeco-Roman theories of leisure, pleasure and the natural world.
#Chinese #philosophy, #chineseliterature, #comparativestudy, #Comparativeliterature, #ComparativePhilosophy, #classicalliterature
