- Length
- 288 pagesSlingerland, Analects, Hackett, 2003 - with selections from the traditional commentaries
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Analects
A few hundred remarks by a man who considered himself a failure, assembled by his students, which became the moral vocabulary of a third of the world for two thousand years. There is no system in it and no argument, and that is why the arguments about what it means have never stopped.
- Date
- c. 5th-3rd century BC
- Attributed to
- Confucius and disciples
- Region
- The state of Lu, northern China
- Language
- Classical Chinese
- 1687 Latin, Couplet and the Jesuits of Paris Confucius Sinarum Philosophus; the first Western version, and the one Leibniz and Voltaire read Attested
- 1861 English, James Legge Public domain; the version that displaced the Latin Attested
- 2003 English, Edward Slingerland With traditional commentary; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Answered — Drew a named later reply, but was not itself a reply
- Form
- Compiled
- Method
- Aphorism — Short separate statements, repeated rather than built
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
Memorised by every educated person in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam for the better part of two thousand years, and the basis of an examination system that ran to 1905.
What the book says
Twenty short books of remarks, exchanges and fragments, most of them a few lines long, none of them argued for. A student asks what humaneness is and gets one answer; another student asks the same question and gets a different one, fitted to him. Someone asks about government and is told that it consists in the ruler being a ruler, the minister a minister, the father a father and the son a son. Someone asks about serving the spirits and is told that a man who cannot yet serve people has no business asking about spirits. The recurring subjects are few. Ritual, which is not empty ceremony but the whole learned repertoire of how to behave, and which shapes a person from the outside in. Humaneness, the disposition the ritual is for, described dozens of times and never defined. Learning, which is the work of a lifetime and is useless without reflection. Filial devotion, from which every other loyalty is held to grow. And the exemplary person - a term Confucius takes from birth rank and redefines as a matter of conduct, so that a nobody can be noble and a duke can fail to be. Confucius himself appears throughout, in a good mood and a bad one, and says more than once that he is not succeeding.
What it argues
That a person is made rather than born, and made by practice rather than by insight. The instrument is ritual: the whole inherited repertoire of forms - how to greet, how to mourn, how to eat, how to serve - which is not decoration on the moral life but the medium in which it is learned, the way scales are the medium of music. Character formed that way produces humaneness, which Confucius will not define and describes only in cases. Government follows the same logic: a ruler who behaves well is imitated, and a state held together by punishment produces subjects who evade punishment, while one held together by ritual produces subjects with a sense of shame.
What answered it
Mozi, first and hardest, on the grounds that the Confucians had confused inherited practice with justified practice and expensive ritual with virtue. The Daoists answered differently and more mockingly: the Zhuangzi puts Confucius in a series of stories in which he is instructed by hermits, cripples and thieves. Xunzi and Mencius then answered Mozi on the Confucian side while disagreeing violently with each other, and the four-cornered argument between these positions is the substance of classical Chinese philosophy.
How it argues
It does not. The Analects states, questions, and refuses - Confucius declines to define his central term, declines to discuss the supernatural, and answers the same question differently depending on who asks. That last habit is a doctrine in itself: what a particular person should do is not deducible from a rule, and the teacher's job is to say what this student needs to hear. The consequence is that the text cannot be applied without interpretation, which is why two millennia of commentary are not an accretion on it but its normal condition.
The moment
The Zhou order was disintegrating. The rituals that had held an aristocratic society together were still performed but no longer meant anything, states were absorbing each other, and Confucius spent much of his life travelling between courts looking for a ruler who would employ him and failing to find one. The text is the record of a man arguing that the old forms were not empty but had been emptied, and that they could be filled again.
How it travelled
Continuously, institutionally, and to Europe late. Within East Asia it was the core of the education system and, from the Song, one of the Four Books that candidates for office had to know by heart. It reached Europe in 1687, when Jesuits in Paris published a Latin version of three of the Four Books, dedicated to Louis XIV and carrying the first portrait of Confucius printed in the West. Leibniz and Voltaire read that version and used it for their own purposes - as evidence that a great civilisation had built its morality without revelation - and it shaped the European picture of China until Legge's translations two centuries later.
The strongest objection
Mozi's, and the Analects has no answer within its own resources. If affection is properly graded - more for family, less for strangers - then the doctrine either rests on the bare fact that we do feel that way, which is not a justification, or on the claim that graded affection produces better outcomes, which is an argument Mozi is happy to have and thinks he wins. The related charge is that a philosophy of ritual is conservative by construction: it supplies no standpoint from which an inherited practice can be judged bad, only more or less well performed. Later Confucians answered both charges; the text itself does not.
Why read it
Because it is short, plain and unlike any other founding text in being almost entirely without doctrine. Read it in an edition that prints some traditional commentary alongside, because the passages that look flat in translation are usually the ones a Chinese reader would recognise as arguments. And read it slowly: it is a book of a few hundred remarks, and the ones that land are not the famous ones.
- First printed
- 1687
- First in English
- 1861
- Digitised
- Yes
The received text of twenty books was fixed in the Han. Manuscript versions recovered from tombs in the twentieth century differ in wording and in the order of passages, confirming that the text was still fluid when those copies were made.
Legge's 1861 and Waley's 1938 English are widely available and the first is public domain. Slingerland, Ames-Rosemont and Watson are in copyright, and there are more English versions of this text than of any other Chinese work.
Where it stands
Live, and politically live. Confucian ethics is a serious position in contemporary moral philosophy, particularly in work on role obligation and moral cultivation, and the text is also the subject of a state-sponsored revival in China, which is a use of it that scholars and the government describe very differently.
On quoting this book
The Chinese is public domain and Legge's 1861 English is too, but his Victorian rendering of the central terms is now regarded as misleading, and the versions that read well are in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How much of the text goes back to Confucius is the central question and the answer is unknown; the later books contain material most scholars regard as considerably later. Tomb manuscripts recovered in recent decades show the text still unfixed well after his death. Whether the central term should be rendered as benevolence, humaneness, goodness or something else has been argued for a century and the choice carries a whole interpretation. And the modern political use of the text in China is itself now a subject of dispute, both as history and as policy.