Master Kong described his own lifetime:. At fifteen, I set my heart on learning. At thirty, I was firmly established. At forty, I had no more doubts. At fifty, I knew the will of heaven. At sixty, I was ready to listen to it. At seventy, I could follow my heart's desire without transgressing what was right.
Analects, The inner pole of Confucianism was reformist, idealistic, and spiritual. It generated a high ideal for family interaction: members were to treat each other with love, respect, and consideration for the needs of all. It prescribed a lofty ideal for the state: the ruler was to be a father to his people and look after their basic needs.
It required officials to criticize their rulers and refuse to serve the corrupt. This inner and idealist wing spawned a Confucian reformation known in the West as Neo-Confucianism. The movement produced reformers, philanthropists, dedicated teachers and officials, and social philosophers from the eleventh through the nineteenth centuries.
The idealist wing of Confucianism had a religious character. Its ideals were transcendent, not in the sense that they were other worldly the Confucians were not interested in a far-off heavenly realm , but in the sense of the transcendent ideal—perfection.
On the one hand, Confucian values are so closely linked with everyday life that they sometimes seem trivial. Everyday life is so familiar that we do not take its moral content seriously. We are each a friend to someone, or aparent, or certainly the child of a parent. On the other hand, Confucians remind us that the familiar ideals of friendship, parenthood, and filiality are far from trivial; in real life we only rarely attain these ideals. We all too often just go through the motions, too preoccupied to give our full attention to the relationship.
If we consistently and wholeheartedly realized our potential to be the very best friend, parent, son, or daughter humanly possible, we would establish a level of caring, of moral excellence,that would approach the utopian. This is Confucian transcendence: to take the actions of everyday life seriously as the arena of moral and spiritual fulfillment.
The outer and inner aspects of Confucianism—its conforming and reforming sides—were in tension throughout Chinese history. These are examples of the way that ritual fosters the development of particular emotional responses, part of a sophisticated understanding of affective states and the ways that performance channels them in particular directions.
Descriptions of the early community depict Confucius creating a subculture in which ritual provided an alternate source of value, effectively training his disciples to opt out of conventional modes of exchange. The Han period biographical materials in Records of the Historian describe how a high official of the state of Lu did not come to court for three days after the state of Qi made him a gift of female entertainers.
When, additionally, the high official failed to properly offer gifts of sacrificial meats, Confucius departed Lu for the state of Wei 47, cf. Analects Confucius repeatedly rejected conventional values of wealth and position, choosing instead to rely on ritual standards of value. However, here the standard that gives such objects currency is ritual importance rather than longevity, divorcing Confucius from conventional materialistic or hedonistic pursuits.
This is a second way that ritual allows one to direct more effort into character formation. Once, when speaking of cultivating benevolence, Confucius explained how ritual value was connected to the ideal way of the gentleman, which should always take precedence over the pursuit of conventional values:.
Wealth and high social status are what others covet. If I cannot prosper by following the way, I will not dwell in them. Poverty and low social status are what others shun. If I cannot prosper by following the way, I will not avoid them.
The argument that ritual performance has internal benefits underlies the ritual psychology laid out by Confucius, one that explains how performing ritual and music controls desires and sets the stage for further moral development. In this way, the virtues that Confucius taught were not original to him, but represented his adaptations of existing cultural ideals, to which he continually returned in order to clarify their proper expressions in different situations. The virtue of benevolence entails interacting with others guided by a sense of what is good from their perspectives.
Examples of contextual definitions of benevolence include treating people on the street as important guests and common people as if they were attendants at a sacrifice It is the broadest of the virtues, yet a gentleman would rather die than compromise it Benevolence entails a kind of unselfishness, or, as David Hall and Roger Ames suggest, it involves forming moral judgments from a combined perspective of self and others.
The Analects , however, discusses the incubation of benevolent behavior in family and ritual contexts. 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. The second virtue, righteousness, is often described in the Analects relative to situations involving public responsibility.
In contexts where standards of fairness and integrity are valuable, such as acting as the steward of an estate as some of the disciples of Confucius did, righteousness is what keeps a person uncorrupted. Like benevolence, righteousness also entails unselfishness, but instead of coming out of consideration for the needs of others, it is rooted in steadfastness in the face of temptation. More specifically, evaluating things based on their ritual significance can put one at odds with conventional hierarchies of value.
The tale relates how at court, Confucius was given a plate with a peach and a pile of millet grains with which to scrub the fruit clean. After the attendants laughed at Confucius for proceeding to eat the millet first, Confucius explained to them that in sacrifices to the Former Kings, millet itself is the most valued offering. Therefore, cleaning a ritually base peach with millet:. While such stories may have been told to mock his fastidiousness, for Confucius the essence of righteousness was internalizing a system of value that he would breach for neither convenience nor profit.
In the Analects , portrayals of Confucius do not recognize a tension between benevolence and righteousness, perhaps because each is usually described as salient in a different set of contexts. In ritual contexts like courts or shrines, one ideally acts like one might act out of familial affection in a personal context, the paradigm that is key to benevolence.
In the performance of official duties, one ideally acts out of the responsibilities felt to inferiors and superiors, with a resistance to temptation by corrupt gain that is key to righteousness.
The Records of Ritual distinguishes between the domains of these two virtues:. Treating nobility in a noble way and the honorable in an honorable way, is the height of righteousness.
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. In the Analects, Confucius is depicted both teaching and conducting the rites in the manner that he believed they were conducted in antiquity.
We have seen how ritual shapes values by restricting desires, thereby allowing reflection and the cultivation of moral dispositions. Yet without the proper affective state, a person is not properly performing ritual. Knowing the details of ritual protocols is important, but is not a substitute for sincere affect in performing them.
Confucius summarized the different prongs of the education in ritual and music involved in the training of his followers:. Raise yourself up with the Classic of Odes. Establish yourself with ritual. Complete yourself with music. That Confucius insists that his son master classical literature and practices underscores the values of these cultural products as a means of transmitting the way from one generation to the next.
He tells his disciples that the study of the Classic of Odes prepares them for different aspects of life, providing them with a capacity to:. In the ancient world, this kind of education also qualified Confucius and his disciples for employment on estates and at courts. The fourth virtue, wisdom, is related to appraising people and situations.
In the Analects, wisdom allows a gentleman to discern crooked and straight behavior in others One well-known passage often cited to imply Confucius is agnostic about the world of the spirits is more literally about how wisdom allows an outsider to present himself in a way appropriate to the people on whose behalf he is working:. The context for this sort of appraisal is usually official service, and wisdom is often attributed to valued ministers or advisors to sage rulers.
In certain dialogues, wisdom also connotes a moral discernment that allows the gentleman to be confident of the appropriateness of good actions. In soliloquies about several virtues, Confucius describes a wise person as never confused 9. While comparative philosophers have noted that Chinese thought has nothing clearly analogous to the role of the will in pre-modern European philosophy, 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. While trustworthiness may be rooted in the proper expression of friendship between those of the same status 1.
The implication is that a sincerely public-minded official would be ineffective without the trust that this quality inspires. 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.
Some texts described a level of moral perfection, as with the sages of antiquity, as unifying all these virtues. Prior to this, it is unclear whether the possession of a particular virtue entailed having all the others, although benevolence was sometimes used as a more general term for a combination of one or more of the other virtues e.
At other times, Confucius presented individual virtues as expressions of goodness in particular domains of life. Early Confucius dialogues are embedded in concrete situations, and so resist attempts to distill them into more abstract principles of morality.
As a result, descriptions of the virtues are embedded in anecdotes about the exemplary individuals whose character traits the dialogues encourage their audience to develop.
The five virtues described above are not the only ones of which Confucius spoke. Yet going through a list of all the virtues in the early sources is not sufficient to describe the entirety of the moral universe associated with Confucius.
Christopher Goscha Published in 09 Mar China Religion. Related Articles. Vietnam Before The War. The Return to Confucius?
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