Confucius: Philosophy in an Hour. Paul Strathern
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Confucius
PHILOSOPHY IN AN HOUR
Paul Strathern
Table of Contents
Chronology of Significant Philosophical Dates
Chronology of Confucius’s Life
Confucius knew all about life, but we know very little about his life. This leaves us at rather a loss when judging him personally. He told us how to behave, but we can’t find out precisely what he was up to.
Confucius is a close contender for The Most Influential Man in History – so we’re lucky that his philosophy was nebulous and rather boring. His collection of well-meaning platitudes, quaint maxims, and quasi-enigmatic anecdotes combined to produce an ideal philosophy for civil servants. And this was precisely Confucius’s intention. Unlike other sages, he had no wish to see his disciples become penniless vagabonds roaming the highways and byways in a state of unemployable enlightenment. His aim was to turn his pupils into good government officials, and in this he succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. For more than two thousand years his teaching provided rules of conduct and spiritual fodder for the clerks, schoolmasters, ministers, and administrators amidst the stultifying conformity of the Chinese Empire. This was the empire that gave us the curse: ‘May you live in interesting times.’ In Confucian China, boredom was bliss. Not surprising when you consider the alternatives. If you stepped out of line, committing even a minor offense, you were lucky if you got away with castration. The court of many an irascible Chinese ruler sounded as if it was run by a bevy of schoolchildren.
Until the Communist revolution of 1949, Confucianism was almost synonymous with the Chinese way of life. During the Mao era in mainland China, Confucianism was regarded with deep ambivalence. Confucius himself was reviled as one of the class of ‘landlords and capitalists’. (In fact, he qualified for neither of these exalted categories. Confucius spent most of his life unemployed, was always short of money, and had no estate.) During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, the Red Guards attempted to purge the last remnants of Confucianism from Chinese thought. Even so, Chairman Mao continued on occasion to encourage his comrades with sayings by Confucius. Both of these latter facts point to a strong undercurrent of Confucianism in Chinese thought which persisted beneath the veneer of Marxism.
On the other hand, Confucianism remained, and remains, very much alive throughout the Chinese diaspora – from Taiwan to Chinatowns the world over. The sayings of Confucius succeed from one generation to the next, his name having achieved a cultural centrality similar to Shakespeare for the English or Goethe for the Germans.
Yet surprisingly, Confucius himself was a failure. Or so he thought (and who are we to contradict such a wise man). Confucius considered that he had not succeeded in life, and died a disappointed man.
Confucius is the latinised form of Kungfutzu (which means ‘the master Kung’). He was born in the sixth century B.C. and lived for the most part in the north-central coastal region of China. The sixth century B.C. was arguably the most significant in human evolution since the first caveman inadvertently set fire to his home. Beside witnessing the birth of Confucius, this century also saw the founding of Taoism, the birth of Buddha, and the inception of Greek philosophy. Why these vital intellectual events should have taken place just then, for the most part in civilisations that were in disparate states of development and had no contact with each other, remains a mystery. (Some of the solutions put forward – visits from alien spaceships, exceptional activity on the surface of the sun, brain disease, etc. – would suggest that our mental development has not progressed much since this era.)
Confucius was born in 551 B.C. in the feudal state of Lu, which now forms part of the north-central coastal province of Shantung. He came from a long line of impoverished nobility and is said to have been directly descended from the rulers of the Shang dynasty.
This was China’s earliest dynasty, which lasted more than six hundred years from the eighteenth to the twelfth century B.C. It was said that the people produced azure pots painted with beautiful flowers and used pink cowrie shells as currency. According to legend, its inhabitants were credited with inventing Chinese writing so that they could communicate with their ancestors by means of messages carved on tortoise shells. Naturally such enchanting nonsense was dismissed by serious historians, until recent archaeological discoveries confirmed the existence and lifestyle of just such a dynasty during the second millennium B.C. But unfortunately no messages to early members of Confucius’s family have yet been discovered among the tortoiseshell tomes.
What we do know is that Confucius’s father was a minor military official and was seventy at the time of Confucius’s birth. When Confucius was three his father died and he was brought up by his mother. (Curiously, of the dozen or so figures who founded the world’s great philosophies and religions, a large majority were brought up in single-parent families.)
Late in life, Confucius was to remember: ‘When I was fifteen I was only interested in studying.’ This was the bedrock of his life, which he would later see as having been divided into distinct stages: ‘… When I was thirty I began my life; at forty I was self-assured; at fifty I understood my place in the vast scheme of things; at sixty I learned to give up arguing; and now at seventy I can do whatever I like without disrupting my life.’ How much of this is genuine spiritual autobiography, and how much is Confucius’s variant on traditional wisdom concerning the ‘ages of man’, it’s difficult to say. Either way, it contains little of personal particularity – or what the modern reader would consider a ‘life’.
Apart from Confucius’s self-proclaimed love of learning, little is