Confucianism (classical)
from 500 BCE c.
Character is formed by practice, ritual and relationship rather than by rules, and a society is only as good as the people conducting themselves within it.
- Active
- from 500 BCE
- Where
- Lu, and then everywhere in East Asia
- Also
- 儒家 Rújiā
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Chinese
The claim
Ren — humaneness — is what a person is cultivating, and li — ritual propriety — is how. The two are inseparable: ritual without humaneness is empty, humaneness without form has no way to act.
What it held
Confucius offers almost no arguments and almost no definitions. The Analects is a collection of exchanges, and ren is described differently to each questioner according to what that person needs to hear. This is deliberate: the aim is to form a kind of person rather than to transmit a doctrine, and the same advice will not do it for everyone.
The five relationships supply the structure — ruler and subject, parent and child, husband and wife, elder and younger sibling, friend and friend — and each carries obligations in both directions. The much-repeated charge of authoritarianism sits awkwardly with a tradition in which the minister's duty is to remonstrate and the ruler who loses virtue loses the mandate.
Mencius and Xunzi then divide the school on human nature. Mencius argues it is good, from the observation that anyone seeing a child about to fall into a well feels alarm without calculating. Xunzi argues it is bad and that ritual is what makes people otherwise, comparing character to warped wood that must be steamed straight.
Both agree the work is cultivation. They disagree about what the raw material is like.
How it argued
Teaching by example, exchange and correction, with the classics as a curriculum and history as the source of cases.
What it was arguing against
Mohist impartial care, which Mencius said abolished the father; Daoist withdrawal from public duty; and Legalist government by punishment alone.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether human nature is good, which divides Mencius from Xunzi and was never settled. Whether ritual is intrinsically valuable or instrumentally so.
Common misconceptions
That it is a religion, or that it is essentially about obedience. The tradition's own texts insist on remonstration, on the ruler's obligations, and on the right to withdraw service from an unworthy state. Confucius spent his career unemployed for exactly that reason.
How it began
A minor official in the state of Lu who failed to get the political appointment he wanted, taught instead, and claimed to be transmitting rather than creating.
What became of it
Became the state ideology in the Han and the basis of the examination system for two thousand years, then was attacked as the source of China's backwardness, and is now being re-examined again.
Lasting influence
The government, education and family life of China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam. The examination system is the world's first meritocratic bureaucracy and is his tradition's institutional legacy.
Why it still matters
Virtue ethics has taken it up seriously in the last forty years, and role ethics — obligations arising from relationships rather than from principles — is a live position drawn largely from here.
Put another way
A craftsman shaping wood, who must know both the tool and the grain.
Where to start
The Analects, in a translation with commentary — it is unreadable cold and rewarding with help.
The surprising bit
He judged his own life a failure. He never obtained the office he sought, wandered between states for over a decade, and died thinking the teaching had not taken.
In their own words
Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.
At seventy I could follow my heart's desire without overstepping the bounds.
Connections
- Opposed by
- Mohism, Legalism (Fajia), Daoism (Dao-jia)
The verdict
The most institutionally successful philosophy in history, founded by a man who could not get a job.