Confucius Notes

Confucius

Overview

• Confucius (trad. 551–479 BCE) has been portrayed in many ways throughout Chinese history including as a teacher, advisor, editor, philosopher, reformer, and prophet.
• The name Confucius is a Latinized combination of Kong 孔 with an honorific suffix “Master” (fuzi 夫子).
• He is considered the most significant thinker in East Asian history, associated with foundational concepts and cultural practices.
• Early sources provide biographical details, but dialogues and stories in texts like the Analects (Lunyu 論語) show diverse representations.
• The philosophy of Confucius is historically underdetermined, with multiple coherent doctrines traceable to the early period.
• Key areas of concern:
  • A psychology of ritual.
  • An ethics rooted in personal virtues.
  • A theory of society and politics.
• The term Ru (儒) predates Confucius, referring to specialists in ritual, music, and Classical Studies.
• The term "Confucian" is avoided to focus on the philosophical aspects of Confucius's thought, primarily through the Analects.

Confucius as Philosopher and Symbol

• Interpretations of Confucius have changed over time based on political and social priorities.
• In Imperial China, Confucius was linked to interpretations of classics and moral guidelines for administrators.
• He was associated with the transmission of the ancient sacrificial system.
• By the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE), Confucius was an authoritative figure in various cultural domains.
• Commentaries on texts associated with him were important to rulers.
• During the Song period (960–1279), Neo-Confucianism anchored readings of Confucius to a dualism between “cosmic pattern” (li\ 理) and “pneumas” (qi\ 氣).
• Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) integrated the study of the Analects into the “Four Books” (Sishu\ 四書).
• The pre-modern Confucius was associated with good government, moral education, ritual performance, and reciprocal obligations.
• In eighteenth-century Europe, Confucius was identified as China’s first philosopher.
• Jesuit missionaries portrayed him as inspired by Natural Theology.
• Enlightenment writers praised Confucius for discovering universal natural laws through reason.
• Modern interpretations view him as an emblem of “traditional culture”.
• Some reformers saw his teachings as a basis for modernizing China.
• Others rejected Confucius due to his association with traditional hierarchies and inequalities.
• The association of Confucius with the education of scholar-officials connected him to debates about tradition and modernization.
• As legacies tied to ritual roles were criticized, a view of Confucius as a moral philosopher gained prominence.
• Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) compared Confucius to Socrates and Plato.

Sources for Confucius’s Life

• Biographical treatments of Confucius were based on independently circulating dialogues and prose accounts.

• Linking elements of his philosophy to his life experiences is risky.

• The biography of Confucius has been intimately linked with the interpretation of his philosophy.

• Confucius was born in the domain of Zou, modern Shandong Province.

• His birth is dated to 551 BCE.

• His father, from Lu, was descended from a noble clan.

• Confucius became known for expertise in classical ritual forms.

• He worked as an official for aristocratic families in Lu.

• Sources identify him as Director of Corrections (Sikou\ 司寇), Foodstuffs Scribe (Weili\ 委吏), and Scribe in the Field (Chengtian\ 乘田).

• Sima Qian mentions offices such as Steward (Zai\ 宰), Minister of Works (Sikong\ 司空), and acting Chancellor (Xiang\ 相).

• After leaving Lu, Confucius traveled to various kingdoms.

• He taught late in life, training disciples in ritual and the Classics.

• Sima Qian identified 77 direct disciples.

• Some 3000 students received some form of training.

• The large number of disciples and inconsistent accounts may be due to divergent regional traditions.

• The many sources provide a wealth of materials, but an incomplete sense of which are authoritative.

• The conventional view is that the twenty chapters of the transmitted Analects most accurately represent Confucius’s original teachings.

• Ban Gu (39–92 CE) described the Analects as compiled by first and second-generation disciples, transmitted privately.

• Liu Baonan 劉寳楠 (1791–1855) believed each chapter was written by a different disciple.

• Zhu Weizheng 朱維錚 argued that the Analects' traditional status is undeserved.

• Michael J. Hunter showed that writers started to demonstrate an acute interest in the Analects only in the late second and first centuries BCE.

• Expanding the corpus requires attention to additional sources.

• 1. Dialogues preserved in transmitted sources like the Records of Ritual, the Elder Dai’s Records of Ritual (DaDai Liji\ 大戴禮記), and Han collections like the Family Discussions of Confucius (Kongzi jiayu\ 孔子家语).

• 2. Quotations attached to the interpretation of passages in the classics.

• 3. Archaeologically recovered texts from the Han period and before.

• These include versions of texts parallel to the transmitted Analects.

• The Haihun excavation may contain the two lost chapters of a 22-chapter version of the Analects.

• Previously unknown Confucius dialogues and quotations have also been unearthed.

• These finds confirm the wide circulation of the Analects in the middle of the first century BCE.

• The fluidity and diversity prior to the fixing of the Analects suggest it was a topical selection.

• Multiple topical foci existed prior to any definitive horizon.

• The core of the teachings of Confucius is historically underdetermined and debated.

• Key aspects of the philosophy of Confucius:

  • A theory of ritual and musical performance.
  • Advice on personal virtues.
  • A social and political philosophy.

Ritual Psychology and Social Values

• Confucius was deeply concerned with ritual and music.
• Proper performance was key to reforming desires and developing moral dispositions.
• He sought to preserve the Zhou ritual system.
• Many biographies describe his mastery of ritual and music.
• The archaeological record shows sumptuary regulations encoding social status.
• Ancestral sacrifice was a means to demonstrate reverence and seek protection.
• The Analects describes his ritual mastery.
• He insists on adherence to the letter of the rites.
• Confucius innovated in his rationale for performing the rites and music.
• Early discussions explained ritual in terms of offering to receive benefits.
• Discussions between Confucius and his disciples described benefits beyond propitiation.
• These works stressed the value of the associated interior psychological states.
• Confucius condemned the performance of ritual without reverence (jing\ 敬).
• He condemned views focusing only on offerings or instruments.
• Reverence is the most important aspect of mourning rites.
• The affective state behind the action is more important than the action’s consequences.
• Ritual and music are not just indicators of values but also inculcators of them.
• Performance restricts desires because it alters affective states.
• King Wen was moved to joy when making offerings, then to grief once the ritual ended.
• Different emotions are associated with different parts of a ruler’s day.
• Ritual fosters the development of particular emotional responses.
• Social conventions restrict people’s latitude to pursue their desires.
• Adhering to social norms preserves psychological space to reflect.
• Ritual provides an alternate source of value.
• Confucius rejected conventional values of wealth and position.
• He relied on ritual standards of value.
• Ritual allows one to direct more effort into character formation.
• The argument that ritual performance has internal benefits underlies the ritual psychology.

Virtues and Character Formation

• The development of behaviors associated with the moral ideal of the “way” (dao\ 道) of the “gentleman” (junzi\ 君子).

• These patterns are described as “virtue”.

• A person who behaves with filial piety (xiao) to parents and siblings (di\ 弟), and who avoids going against superiors, will rarely disorder society.

• “The gentleman works at the roots. Once the roots are established, the way comes to life” (1.2).

• The way of the gentleman is a distillation of the exemplary behaviors of the selfless culture heroes of the past.

• The virtues were not original to him, but adaptations of existing cultural ideals.

• Five behaviors of the gentleman most central to the Analects:

  • benevolence (ren\ 仁)
  • righteousness (yi\ 義)
  • ritual propriety (li\ 禮)
  • wisdom (zhi\ 智)
  • trustworthiness (xin\ 信)

• Benevolence entails interacting with others guided by a sense of what is good from their perspectives.

• Examples include:

  • treating people on the street as important guests and common people as if they were attendants at a sacrifice.
  • being reticent in speaking and rejecting the use of clever speech.
  • being respectful where one dwells, reverent where one works, and loyal where one deals with others.

• Benevolence entails a kind of selflessness.

• Mencius argued that benevolence grows out of the cultivation of an affective disposition to compassion (ceyin\ 惻隱) in the face of another’s distress.

• “By nature people are close, by habituation they are miles apart” (17.2), a sentiment that suggests the importance of training one’s dispositions through ritual and the classics.

• Confucius tells his disciple Yan Yuan 顏淵 that benevolence is a matter of “overcoming oneself and returning to ritual propriety” (12.1).

• These connections between benevolence and other virtues underscore the way in which benevolent behavior does not entail creating novel social forms or relationships, but is grounded in traditional familial and ritual networks.

• Righteousness is often described in the Analects relative to situations involving public responsibility.

• Confucius wrote that a gentleman “thinks of righteousness when faced with gain” (16.10, 19.10), or “when faced with profit” (14.12).

• One should ignore the wealth and rank one might attain by acting against righteousness.

• Xunzi celebrated Confucius for his righteousness in office.

• The perspective needed to act in a righteous way is sometimes related to an attitude to personal profit.

• Evaluating things based on their ritual significance can put one at odds with conventional hierarchies of value.

• At times, the phrase “benevolence and righteousness” is used metonymically for all the virtues.

• The Records of Ritual distinguishes between the domains of these two virtues:

• 1. In regulating one’s household, kindness overrules righteousness.

• 2. Outside of one’s house, righteousness cuts off kindness.

• While it is not the case that righteousness is benevolence by other means, this passage underlines how in different contexts, different virtues may push people toward participation in particular shared cultural practices constitutive of the good life.

• The virtue of “ritual propriety” expresses a sensitivity to one’s social place.

• The term (li\ 禮) translated here as “ritual propriety” has a particularly wide range of connotations, and additionally connotes both the conventions of ritual and etiquette.

• “Do not look or listen, speak or move, unless it is in accordance with the rites” (12.1).

• Without the proper affective state, a person is not properly performing ritual.

• Confucius says he cannot tolerate “ritual without reverence, or mourning without grief,” (3.26).

• Knowing the details of ritual protocols is important, but is not a substitute for sincere affect in performing them.

• The mastery that “ritual propriety” signaled was part of a curriculum associated with the training of rulers and officials, and proper ritual performance at court could also serve as a kind of political legitimation.

• The study of the Classic of Odes prepares them for different aspects of life, providing them with a capacity to:

  • Raise yourself up with the Classic of Odes.
  • Establish yourself with ritual.
  • Complete yourself with music.
  • At home serve one’s father, away from it serve one’s lord, as well as increase one’s knowledge of the names of birds, animals, plants and trees.

• The virtue of wisdom is related to appraising people and situations.

• The “Thicket of Sayings” excavated at Guodian indicates that this knowledge is the basis for properly “selecting” others, defining wisdom as the virtue that is the basis for selection.

• The context for this sort of appraisal is usually official service, and wisdom is often attributed to valued ministers or advisors to sage rulers.

• The moral discernment that is part of wisdom does provide actors with confidence that the moral actions they have taken are correct.

• The virtue of trustworthiness qualifies a gentleman to give advice to a ruler, and a ruler or official to manage others.

• “if one is trustworthy, others will give one responsibilities” (17.6, cf. 20.1).

• Being able to rely on someone is so important to Confucius that, when asked about good government, he explained that trustworthiness was superior to either food or weapons, concluding: “If the people do not find the ruler trustworthy, the state will not stand” (12.7).

• By the Han period, benevolence, righteousness, ritual propriety, wisdom and trustworthiness began to be considered as a complete set of human virtues, corresponding with other quintets of phenomena used to describe the natural world.

• A modern evaluation of the teachings of Confucius as a “virtue ethics” is articulated in Bryan W. Van Norden’s Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy, which pays particular attention to analogies between the way of Confucius and Aristotle’s “good life”.

• The presence of themes in the Analects highlights the unsystematic nature of the text and underscore that teaching others how to cultivate the virtues is a key aspect, but only a part, of the ethical ideal of Confucius.

• There is a conundrum inherent in any attempt to derive abstract moral rules from the mostly dialogical form of the Analects, that is, the problem of whether the situational context and conversation partner is integral to evaluating the statements of Confucius.

• This is a point about the efficacy of moral suasion, saying that a ruler cannot expect to reform society solely by command since it is only the ruler’s personal example that can transform others.

The Family and the State

• Early Zhou political philosophy centered on moral justification for political authority based on the doctrine of the “Mandate of Heaven” (tianming\ 天命).

• Political success or failure is a function of moral quality, evidenced by actions such as proper ritual performance, on the part of the ruler.

• Confucius adapted the classical view of moral authority, connecting it to a normative picture of society.

• He linked filial piety in the family to loyalty in the political realm:

• 1. It is rare for a person who is filially pious to his parents and older siblings to be inclined to rebel against his superiors… Filial piety to parents and elder siblings may be considered the root of a person. (1.2)

• Originally limited to descriptions of sacrifice to ancestors in the context of hereditary kinship groups, a more extended meaning of “filial piety” was used to describe the sage king Shun’s 舜 (trad. r. 2256–2205 BCE) treatment of his living father in the Classic of Documents.

• Confucius praised the ancient sage kings at great length, and the sage king Yu 禹 for his filial piety in the context of sacrifice (8.21).

• In rationalizing the moral content of legacies of the past like the three-year mourning period after the death of a parent, Confucius reasoned that for three years a filially pious child should not alter a parent’s way (4.20, cf. 19.18).

• Intellectual historian Chen Lai identified two sets of ideal traits that became hybridized in the late Warring States period.

• The first set of qualities describes the virtue of the ruler coming out of politically-oriented descriptions of figures like King Wen of Zhou, including uprightness (zhi\ 直) and fortitude (gang\ 剛).

• The second set of qualities is based on bonds specific to kinship groups, including filial piety and kindness (ci\ 慈).

• Consequently, Confucius had to effectively integrate clan priorities and state priorities.

• In the Classic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing 孝經), similar reasoning is applied to a redefinition of filial piety that rejects behaviors like such extreme submission because protecting one’s body is a duty to one’s parents.

• Since filial piety was based on a fundamental relationship defined within the family, one’s family role and state role could conflict.

• When asked about a an named Zhi Gong who testified against his father for stealting a sheep Confucius answers: “In my circle, being upright differs from this. A father would conceal such a thing on behalf of his son, and a son would conceal it on behalf of his father. Uprightness is found in this.” (13.18)

• Confucius was adapting filial piety to a wider manifold of moral behaviors, honing his answer to the question of how a child balances responsibility to family and loyalty to the state.

• Statements like “filial piety is the root of virtuous action” from the Classic of Filial Piety connect loyalty and the kind of action that signals the personal virtue that justifies political authority, as in the historical precedent of the sage king Shun.

• The Classic of Odes consists of 305 Zhou period regulated lyrics became numbered as one of the Five Classics (Wujing) in the Han dynasty.

• Critical to a number of these lyrics is the celebration of King Wen of Zhou’s overthrow of the Shang, which is an example of a virtuous person seizing the “Mandate of Heaven”.

• The Classic of Documents is a collection that includes orations attributed to the sage rulers of the past and their ministers, and its arguments often concern moral authority with a focus on the methods and character of exemplary rulers of the past.

• The Zhou political view that Confucius inherited was based on supernatural intercession to place a person with personal virtue in charge of the state, but over time the emphasis shifted to the way that the effects of good government could be viewed as proof of a continuing moral justification for that placement.

• The Han period Records of the Historian biography of Confucius described him as possessing all the personal qualities needed to govern well, but wandering from state to state because those qualities had not been recognized.

• When his favorite disciple died, the Analects records Confucius saying that “Heaven has forsaken me!” (11.9).

• Changing views of the scope of Heaven’s activity and the ways human beings may have knowledge of that activity fostered a change in the role of Heaven in political theory.

• In integrating the classical legacy of the “Mandate of Heaven” that applied specifically to the ruler or “Son of Heaven” (tianzi\ 天子), with moral teachings that were directed to a wider audience, the nature of Heaven’s intercession came to be understood differently.

• The gentleman’s awe of Heaven is combined with an awe of the words of the sages (16.8).

• Personal qualities of modesty, filial piety or respect for the elders were seen as proof of fitness to serve in an official capacity.

• Qualification to rule was demonstrated by proper behavior in the social roles defined by the “five relationships” (wulun\ 五倫), a formulation seen in the writings of Mencius that became a key feature of the interpretation of works associated with Confucius in the Han dynasty.

• A description of the five relationships:

  • ruler and subject,
  • parent and child,
  • husband and wife,
  • siblings,
  • friends.

• As with the rituals and the virtues, filial piety and the mandate of Heaven were transformed as they were integrated with the classics through the voices of Confucius and the rulers and disciples of his era.

• The complexity of the philosophical views associated with Confucius is due in part to the fact that this metonymic usage was to some degree already the case in the Han period.

• Confucius read the traditional culture of the halcyon Zhou period in a particular way, but this reading was continuously reflected and refracted through different lenses during the Pre-Imperial period, prior to the results being fixed in diverse early Imperial period sources like the Analects, the Records of Ritual, and the Records of the Historian.