Confucius

Introduction

Confucius was a top-notch Chinese philosopher of spring and autumn period. He was born in 551 BC. He was highly inclined towards the concept of governmental and personal morality, justice, sincerity, and social relationship. His philosophical notions were famous in innumerable Chinese doctrines. Confucius, humbly yet somewhat puzzlingly, says that he was not attempting to innovate but only to transmit what had been there in antiquity, particularly the Wen civilization of the Zhou dynasty (and some elements from the Xia and Shang dynasties). Though he wrestled with revivifying the bygone Zhou civilization of the Clan Law and social and political rituals (li), Confucius was neither a blind political conservative nor an anachronistic Romanist.

In a profound sense, as the famous Legalist Li Si later complained about the Confucians, Confucius used the past to reform the present, while reinventing the past itself. In other words, Confucius was committed to “reviewing the old as a means of realizing the new.” The gist of Confucius's social and political ideas lies in his creative reclaim of tradition (Jaspers, pp. 136).

History Context

Western Political Tradition

In comparison to Western political tradition, the defining characteristic of Confucianism as a distinctive political and cultural tradition lies in its enormous ethicopolitical emphasis on the family (jia) and filial piety (xiao). One telling example is, when asked why he was not engaged in governing, Confucius replied, “It is all in filial conduct! Just being filial to your parents and befriending your brothers is carrying out the work of government.” This Confucian assumption of familial as political or what can be called Confucian familism, however, cannot be fully made sense of without considering China's pre-Confucian Zhou civilization (c. 1100-249 BCE), which was predicated on kin feudalism (fengjian) and the Clan Law (zongfa), the civilization (wen) that Confucius aspired to creatively revivify (Cai, pp. 45). By the eighth century BCE, however, the Zhou court's kingly authority was only nominally maintained as it was challenged by the rising feudal lords within and constantly infiltrated by the northern barbarians without, and by late fifth century BCE even Zhou's ostensible authority was no longer upheld. Chinese call this time the Spring and Autumn period (770-476 BCE), distinguishing it from the Warring States period (475-221 BCE) that followed it, when, unconstrained by any higher authority, seven to ten (finally seven) hegemonic feudal states struggled violently for supremacy until the reunification of the Middle Kingdom by the state of Qin in 221 BCE, which employed Legalism (fajia) as its statecraft.

Classical Confucians

What worried classical Confucians most—Confucius having witnessed the helpless collapse of the Zhou civilization in the last Spring and Autumn period, and Mencius and Xunzi active from the heyday of the Warring State period—was the rise of realpolitik among the competing states, the tendency to separate statecraft from morality, replacing the political ritualism of the Zhou civilization. Apart from advocating the traditional fusion of politics and morals, however, the three Confucian giants diverged on how and to what degree politics and morals should be connected, each creating his version ...