Confucius: the first humanist
The sage gave a vicious world its first code of ethics. Many listened, few acted.
This is Who made our minds? my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Coming up: Pascal’s Wager; The Hammer of Witches; Socrates and the first ‘self’
I ONCE imagined Confucius hovering cross-legged above the squalor by the sheer power of his mind, a sage of unearthly wisdom in harmony with but not of the Earth.
In truth, Confucius (Kong Fuzi or Kongzi), who lived from c. 551 BCE to c. 479 BCE, was very much of this Earth yet far from being in harmony with it.
Confucius’ thoughts collided with a society he perceived as corrupt, violent, vulgar and decadent. Rather than revolt against it, or surrender to it, he took the hardest path conceivable: he tried to harmonise the world by recreating it in his image of what it should be.
‘The Master’ composed a parallel universe of ideals and laws that, he taught, would engender peace, sincerity, benevolence and compassion. Many listened to his teachings, but few acted on them; most rejected, scorned or ignored him.
The philosopher to whom the Chinese owe 2500 years of earthly wisdom, and whose teachings would become an unofficial state religion, was born on or around 28 September 551 BCE in Lu, in what is today Shandong Province, into a long line of soldiers and officials descended from the dukes of Song, one of whom abdicated his claim to the throne and was thus obliged to start a new dynasty, the K’ung.
Young Kongzi – his name was Latinised to ‘Confucius’ by sixteenth-century Christian missionaries – lost his father, reputedly a commander of great bravery, when he was three. As he grew, the boy loved to re-enact courtly ceremonies, a propitious self-apprenticeship for one who would place ritual at the seat of self-improvement.
At fifteen, Confucius dedicated himself to learning. His family were impoverished, so he strove to advance himself to pay the bills. He married at nineteen and the couple received, on the birth of their son, a gift of two carp from Duke Ch’aou, in whose honour Confucius named his son Li (‘The Carp’). The duke’s influence got Confucius his first job, as a keeper of grain stores. At twenty-two, he took up teaching.
His pupils’ intellectual curiosity, not their money, was his criteria for accepting them: ‘I do not open up the truth to one who is not eager to get knowledge,’ he wrote, ‘nor help out anyone who is not anxious to explain himself.’
As an acclaimed teacher, Confucius was recommended to the sons of prominent ministers and wealthy businessmen, many of whom became his disciples and joined his travels through the patchwork of feudal states that would later be called China. These were, like Europe’s feudal kingdoms, fringed with tension and skirmishing that would boil over in the 200-year conflict known as the Warring States Period.
As Confucius and his disciples moved through this perilous world, he delighted in meeting the ordinary people. He drew lessons from their stories, many of them apocryphal but illustrative. By the side of the T’ae mountain, as they fled the disorder of Lu, Confucius and his band met a woman wailing by a grave. He sent his man to ask the cause of her grief.
‘You weep as if you had experienced sorrow upon sorrow,’ he said to the woman.
‘It is so,’ she replied. ‘My husband’s father was killed here by a tiger, and my husband also; and now my son has met the same fate.’
‘Why, then, do you not leave?’ Confucius asked. The woman answered: ‘Here there is no oppressive government.’
At which the Master turned to his disciples and said: ‘My children, remember this. Oppressive government is fiercer than a tiger.’
When Confucius returned to Lu, he found his home province racked by chaos and corruption, the rotten fruit of the disastrous administration of Yang Hu, the petty tyrant then in charge. Disgusted, Confucius withheld his wisdom from the chiefs and devoted his life to the study of history, poetry, ritual and music.
Fifteen years later, around 500 BCE, we find him emerging from self-imposed hibernation and – the bankrupt Yang Hu having fled – becoming chief magistrate of a town in Lu. Among his decrees were new rules for nourishing the living and burying the dead (including precise designs for coffins) and codes of self-restraint, sincerity and benevolence.
Their success led to his promotion to Minister of Crime, where his objectives were to shame public dishonesty, and to reward loyalty and sincerity in men, and chastity and submissiveness in women. Penal laws were made redundant, his eulogists later claimed, because there were no offenders.
The rival states grew jealous of the success of Confucius’ reforms. A neighbouring duke feared the Duke of Lu would swallow his state, so he resolved to corrupt Lu by sending him a gift of eighty beautiful young courtesans (with supporting musicians) – at the sight of whom the Duke of Lu shut himself away in his palace for three days to enjoy his ‘gift’. He gave no audience to his ministers, pointedly Confucius, who openly disapproved of the harem raging within.
The Master’s protests were ignored, his advice scorned. Confucius took the hint: his counsel was redundant. He resigned his post and, at the age of fifty-six, returned to the nomadic life, spending the next thirteen years roaming from state to state, writing poems and feeling miserable.
Proceeding westerly towards the state of Qin, Confucius got lost. The local who found him described an ugly stranger lingering by the east gate, with ‘the disconsolate appearance of a stray dog’, a description that delighted Confucius. Legend had it that Confucius was so ugly his mother had shut him away in a cave when he was a boy.
After many adventures, the Master, now in his sixty-ninth year, returned home to be feted by princes and the people, but was bitterly disappointed to find that few of those princes had applied his principles.
‘I should just give up!’ Confucius wrote in his Analects. ‘I have yet to meet someone who is able to perceive his own faults and then take himself to task inwardly.’
One morning Confucius awoke, crooning, ‘The great mountain must crumble / The strong beam must break / And the wise man wither away like a plant.’ Seven days later, on 11 April 478 BCE, Confucius died. The Master left a great body of writing and sayings, which were gathered into a store of wisdom that would shape the consciousness of the Chinese people, billions of whom venerated him as a Chinese saint – an accolade Confucius would have loathed.
Over the centuries, a pageant of emperors and dignitaries visited his tomb, mourned him, sacrificed animals to him and prostrated themselves before him. Few honoured him in the way he would have liked, by truly learning from him.
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And what might we learn? In Confucian thought, there is no ‘individual essence’ unique to oneself, as in the Western tradition. Every member of society is part of an interdependent hierarchy of relationships within families and between friends, the people and the state. Confucius thought of ‘human becomings’, not of ‘human beings’, observed the sinologist Edward Slingerland – becoming a better person, becoming a benevolent role model, becoming a sincere and dutiful citizen or an ‘ideal gentleman’.
This relationship of mutual ‘becoming’ began at home, through obedience to one’s parents. ‘There is a way to being obedient to one’s parents,’ the Master said. ‘If one, on turning his thoughts in upon himself, finds a want of sincerity, he will not be obedient to his parents.’
Sincerity and being true to oneself were cardinal virtues in the Confucian world. All successful relationships depended on it. ‘Sincerity is the end and beginning of things,’ he wrote. ‘Without sincerity there would be nothing.’
Sincerity would ‘become apparent’ if everyone ‘cultivated the shoots of goodness’ inside them, Confucius taught; he had a touching faith in our inherent capacity for goodness.
And this would trigger a ripple effect: having become apparent, sincerity then ‘becomes manifest. From being manifest, it becomes brilliant. Brilliant, it affects others. Affecting others, they are changed by it. Changed by it, they are transformed. It is only he who is possessed of the most complete sincerity that can exist under heaven, who can transform.’ In this way, the truly sincere man did not merely accomplish the ‘self-completion of himself’: ‘With this quality,’ Confucius taught, ‘he completes other men also.’
Along with sincerity, honour and duty were the chief planks of Confucian thought. ‘Do not be concerned that no one has heard of you,’ he told his disciples, ‘but rather strive to become a person worthy of being known.’ Countless disciples – of whom the most celebrated were Mencius, Xunzi, Tsae Go, Tsze Kung and Yew Jo – listened to the Master’s wisdom and tried, usually in vain, to apply it. Many wanted renown before they had done anything to earn it.
Confucius liked to tell them that he was merely the ‘transmitter’, not the ‘maker’, of wisdom, but he never explained who the maker was. If he believed the maker was a god, he never said so.
Striking by its absence from Confucian philosophy is any sense of the inner man (Confucius gave little serious thought to women). He failed or refused to develop any concept of psychological interiority, argued the philosopher Herbert Fingarette: ‘My thesis is that the entire notion never entered his head. The metaphor of an inner psychic life, in all its ramifications so familiar to us, simply is not present in the Analects, not even as a rejected possibility.’
Confucius had little, if anything, to say on metaphysics, the after-life or spiritual ideas; by his own admission, he had not studied them. He was silent on the nature and immortality of the soul.
If he conceded that ‘Heaven gave birth to the people’, he did so to reassure popular feeling. Otherwise, he had no stated interest in spirits or gods: ‘He gives no explicit utterance on the state of man after death,’ wrote the Confucian scholar David Howard Smith. ‘He assumes that man continues to live on after death, but says nothing definite as to his future existence.’
Confucius sought Heaven in humanity, not in gods. He shunned talk of creation myths and ancestral spirits because he felt loath to speculate about what he could not see or understand. He revered his ancestors but never contemplated ancestor ‘worship’ – this, at a time when the deification of ancestral spirits was prevalent. Confucius’ mind always cleaved to life and the living.
When a disciple asked him how one should honour ancestral spirits, Confucius answered with his familiar gnomic brilliance:
‘While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve their spirits?’
Another inquired about death: ‘You do not yet understand life,’ Confucius replied. ‘How could you possibly understand death?’
There speaks Confucius the first humanist, who devoted his life to understanding earthly wisdom, human virtue and sincerity. Perhaps his greatest achievement was to demonstrate that belief in the possibility of human virtue need not be shrouded in myths and miracles to attract and retain believers. Virtue was its own advertisement.
‘Confucius had no interest in falsehood,’ concluded the French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire. ‘He did not pretend to be a prophet; he claimed no inspiration: he taught no new religion; he used no delusions; flattered not the emperor under whom he lived: he did not even mention him.’
Chinese rulers would later debate whether to deify Confucius and make Confucianism the state religion. They never did, and the Master would have been relieved. Confucius never wanted to lead a religion. He saw himself as the transmitter of a path to ‘being’, rooted in sincerity, self-restraint and goodwill. That may be easy to say but near impossible to do as Confucius did.
Next Thursday, 26th September 2024: Pascal’s wager
Selected sources and further reading:
Chen, S. and Liu, H. (2010). ‘On Pleasure: A Reflection on Happiness from the Confucian and Daoist Perspectives’, Frontiers of Philosophy in China, 5(2), pp. 179–95.
Chen, Y. (2013) Confucianism as Religion: Controversies and Consequences, Boston MA: Brill.
Confucius and Confucian scholars, and Legge, J. (transl.) (2016) Four Books and Five Classics of Confucianism (The Four Books: Great Learning, Doctrine of the Mean, Analects, Mencius; the Five Classics: Classic of Poetry, Book of Documents, Book of Rites, I Ching, Spring and Autumn Annals), Delphi Collected Works of Confucius, Hastings UK: Delphi Classics.
Fingarette, H. (1972) Confucius: The Secular As Sacred, New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Howard Smith, D. (3 September 1958) ‘Chinese Concepts of the Soul’, Numen, 5(3) pp. 165–79.
Howard Smith, D. (1973) Confucius, Temple Smith.
Hu, S. (March 2007) ‘Confucianism and Contemporary Chinese Politics’, Politics and Policy, 35(1).
Li, C. (2006) ‘The Confucian Ideal of Harmony’, Philosophy East and West, 56(4), pp. 583–603.
Li, C. (2008) ‘The Philosophy of Harmony in Classical Confucianism’, Philosophy Compass, 3(3), pp. 423–35.
Loewe, M. (2012) ‘Confucian Values and Practices in Han China’, 98, T’oung Pao (International Journal of Chinese Studies).
Slingerland, E. (2019) Mind and Body in Early China: Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Werner, E.T.C. (2018) Myths and Legends of China, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.