Christopher Goscha Published in 09 Mar China Religion. Related Articles. Vietnam Before The War. The Communist Party has overseen an incredible surge of wealth in China in the past 35 years through old-fashioned capitalism. So they went scouring about for a new ideology to justify their government.
Here is a political tradition that is uniquely Chinese and can support their type of authoritarian rule. By reviving Confucius, they are making the case that China has its own political culture based on its own political and philosophical history. China therefore does not have to head toward democracy in the way that Western advocates would like to see happen.
It can have a political future based on what it sees as its philosophical past. In Confucian thinking, it means something very different. At the same time, ordinary people are returning to Confucian ideas in search of the spiritual nourishment they feel is missing in their lives.
There are incredibly high levels of corruption, widespread fraud, and counterfeiting. There are incredible problems with pollution and environmental degradation.
The Confucius Institutes have been a tremendously successful program for China. What makes them controversial is that, when a Confucius Institute shows up at a university, the university is effectively outsourcing its Chinese studies to the Chinese government.
Confucius Institutes are funded by and to a certain extent overseen by an agency of the Chinese state. In academia, this is sometimes seen as an attempt by the Chinese government to control the discourse about China. The Chinese insist all they are doing is promoting Chinese language and Chinese culture.
But because of the controversies these institutes have provoked, you have to wonder whether this is actually intensifying the distrust between the West and China? Some very prominent universities in the United States, like the University of Chicago and Pennsylvania State University, have dropped their relationship with Confucius Institutes. But for our wedding she wanted to add in a traditional Korean ceremony called a paebaek , when we would bow in front of her parents, and afterward they would give us their blessing and toss walnuts and dates into the skirt of her dress to encourage fertility.
I found this a little uncomfortable. So I decided to raise my concerns with my wife. The reason this was so important to her is that filial piety, respect for your parents, is one of the most basic Confucian virtues. So, on my wedding day, I had to get a bowing lesson from my brother-in-law. A few hours later, I found myself with my forehead pressed to the floor with all my friends looking on. It shows the continuing power of Confucian ideas. The Chinese insist all they are doing is promoting Chinese language and Chinese culture.
Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Popular articles. Esther Fleming June 19, Table of Contents. 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.
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