Home > Positioning > Subjects > Metaphilosophy > Philosophy in China > The Confucians

The Confucians

The Ru, the scholars Europe came to call Confucians, trace themselves to Confucius, whose sayings were gathered by his followers in the Analects. Mencius and Xunzi carried the teaching on and disagreed over human nature; in the Han, Wang Chong turned on the Ru’s received opinions.

The Analects opens on learning: “Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application?” (1.1, tr. Legge; the Chinese says “practise it at the proper times”). Learning includes knowing its own limits: “When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it;– this is knowledge” (2.17). It is done for oneself: “In ancient times, men learned with a view to their own improvement. Now-a-days, men learn with a view to the approbation of others” (14.24; literally “for themselves … for others”). Its aim is the junzi, the gentleman, which Legge renders “superior man”; the sage lies beyond: “The sage and the man of perfect virtue;– how dare I rank myself with them? It may simply be said of me, that I strive to become such without satiety, and teach others without weariness” (7.34). A life of it runs from “At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning” to “At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right” (2.4).

“Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous” (2.15). Yet thinking alone fails: “I have been the whole day without eating, and the whole night without sleeping:– occupied with thinking. It was of no use. The better plan is to learn” (15.31). Confucius is “not one who was born in the possession of knowledge”, but “one who is fond of antiquity, and earnest in seeking it there” (7.20), “a transmitter and not a maker” (7.1).

Mencius: “He who has exhausted all his mental constitution knows his nature. Knowing his nature, he knows Heaven” (7A1, tr. Legge). People go looking for their lost fowls and dogs, but not for their lost heart-mind; “the great end of learning is nothing else but to seek for the lost mind” (6A11). He reads the classics with care, “it would be better to be without the Book of History than to give entire credit to it” (7B3), and disputes only under pressure. Asked why others call him fond of disputing, he answers: “Am I fond of disputing? I cannot help it” (3B9; bu de yi), for he must defend the former sages against Yang Zhu and Mozi.

Xunzi opens his book: “The superior man says: Study should never stop” (ch. 1, tr. Dubs). Learning “begins by reciting the Classics and ends in learning the rites. Its purpose begins with making the scholar, and ends in making the sage”; the gentleman learns to make himself beautiful, the petty man to make gifts. In “Dispelling Obsession” (ch. 21) he diagnoses the rival masters, in a rendering from the Chinese: “the common affliction is to be blinkered by one corner and in the dark about the great pattern”. Mozi was blinkered by utility, Huizi (Hui Shi) by words, Zhuangzi by Heaven; Confucius alone was humane, wise and not blinkered. The remedy is a state of the heart-mind, “empty, unified and still”. Of the disputers Hui Shi and Deng Xi he says (ch. 6) they are “very acute but not kind, disputatious but useless”, and yet “what they hold has its grounds, and what they say makes sense”. The gentleman, for Xunzi, must dispute; the fault is disputing to no use.

Wang Chong (27–c. 100 CE) gave his Lunheng, whose heng is the balance, one motto: “Hate fictions and falsehoods” (ch. 61, tr. Forke). “In a great many books reality has no place left: falsehood and immorality triumph over truth and virtue … For this reason the Lun-heng weighs the words, whether they be light or heavy, and holds up a balance for truth and falsehood” (ch. 84). His test is evidence (xiaoyan): “Whenever people in their discussions depart from truth and do not bear out their propositions by evidence, their arguments may be never so pleasing, and their reasons never so abundant, yet nobody believes them” (ch. 79). But the eyes and ears are not enough; the Mohists, he says, “do not use the heart-mind to trace things to their origin; they simply trust what is heard and seen, so even with plain evidence they still miss the reality” (ch. 67). He wrote, he says in Mencius’s words (bu de yi), because “there was no help”.