| Summary: | What is meant by <i>ritual</i> (<i>li</i>) in the Confucian tradition—mostly Xunzi—might be said to be the root of three different concepts-“stages” or concept-“developments” in European philosophy. The first stage is the concept of <i>habit</i>, from the Aristotelian “hexis” to Bourdieu’s “habitus”. The second is the <i>sign</i>, as developed by the American Pragmatists and, in Europe, by Saussure. There is a third, relatively recent stage, as I would classify it, which is Paul Weiss’ <i>surrogate</i>. Weiss uses the pragmatist theorization of habit to construct his original concept of the surrogates. The above stages might be chronological in the way they appear (<i>habit</i>, <i>sign</i>, <i>surrogate</i>), but one does not erase the other. They have the same root—which I would like to argue is the <i>ritual</i>—and they build on it, while each differentiates ritual in its own way. They are distinctive concepts but, at the same time, are related to one another.
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