Philip J. Walsh (2021), Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, 20(1), 1–24 — DOI-10.1007/s11712-020-09759-4
Key takeaways
- Kaepernick’s kneeling is Confucian “ritual resistance”: it subverts the anthem ritual from within while staying faithful to the ideals the ritual expresses, and so founds a new bodily form of patriotism that liberal rights-talk cannot capture.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-164. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Walsh reads Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 anthem protest — first sitting, then, after consulting veteran Nate Boyer, kneeling — through Confucian thought and phenomenology together. The Confucian account of ritual (li) and sagehood explains what the gesture means, and phenomenology describes how ritual works through the body. He argues that the gesture subverts the anthem ritual from within while remaining faithful to its ideals, and institutes a new bodily expression of patriotism compatible with both American and Confucian ideals.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 0 seconds of active reading over 0 sessions. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-164 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as a careful worked example of how a norm-governed bodily practice can be contested from inside, and of Nivison and Hutton’s diachronic reading of Xunzian sagehood put to use. Its standing is as comparative-philosophy interpretation, and its central normative notion (sagehood as uptake) is under-argued.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-164, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: low — t=0, and although well argued, the paper is far from the record’s main threads; the skim captures its structure.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-164 is that reading):
- A worked example of how a norm-bound practice can be contested from inside while affirming its point — relevant to agency and to accounts of legitimate dissent.
- Check how “citational force” is made to do normative rather than merely descriptive work.
- Companion to LIT-174 (Bunton, who also discusses Kaepernick).
Access when seeded: philpapers and philarchive are blocked here; resolved via Crossref (online 2021-01-05, issue 2021-03). Read the author’s accepted manuscript (29 pp.) through CORE’s download of the PhilPapers copy: abstract, keywords, §1, the openings of §§2–7 and the subsection heads of §5. Page numbers are the manuscript’s, not the journal’s.