School
Confucianism
Confucianism is the Chinese ethical and political tradition founded on the teachings of Confucius, centred on humaneness, ritual and learning.
It began with Confucius (551–479 BCE) and was developed by Mencius, who held that human nature is good, and Xunzi, who held that it must be shaped by ritual and education. Dong Zhongshu helped make it the official teaching of the Han dynasty, Zhu Xi reworked it in the Song, and Dai Zhen criticised that reworking in the Qing. It spread to Korea and Japan through thinkers such as Yi Hwang (Toegye) and Ogyū Sorai. On this site it answers questions on how to live, character (3.2.3), moral psychology and government.
Thinkers of this school
- Confucius551 – 479 BCE
- Menciustrad. c. 372 – 289 BCE
- Xunzic. 310 – after 238 BCE
- Dai Zhen1724 – 1777
- Ogyū Sorai1666 – 1728
- Dong Zhongshu179 – 104 BCE
Guide: Schools of Philosophy: The Main -isms and the Questions They Answer
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Filial duty, but whose? In most families I know, the daughter-in-law pays it
In my family, and in almost every family I know, when parents grow old the care is done by a woman who is not their daughter. The son has the duty; the son's wife does the work. Nobody says this out loud.…
Started by Thamarai Raman2 replies -
My mother forwards health rumours to the family group. Is correcting her a duty or a disrespect?
My mother is seventy-one and sharp. She is also the main source of health rumours in our family WhatsApp group: lemon water that cures this, a vaccine that causes that, a "doctor in Singapore" who says something terrifying. Each forward comes with…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
Reading group: Mencius and Gaozi on human nature (6A1–6A6), in one sitting
A short one, for anyone who wants a single sitting rather than a month. The first six sections of Mencius Book 6A are a debate with Gaozi about human nature, and they are some of the best arguments-by-image in any tradition. What…
Started by The Editors1 reply -
The rectification of names, from a translator’s desk: when words and things drift apart
In Analects 13.3 a disciple asks Confucius what he would do first if he were given charge of government. "Rectify names," he says. The disciple thinks this is impractical, and Confucius explains, in a famous chain: if names are not correct, speech…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo1 reply -
Is a promise to someone who has died still binding if no one living would know?
Before she died, my husband's grandmother made me promise that the recipe for our bakery's bread would stay in the family. It is not a secret of state. It is flour, water, salt, a little of something, and the way you fold…
Started by Dilnoza Karimova4 replies -
What were Mencius and Xunzi arguing about when they disagreed about human nature?
I'm writing an essay comparing moral development theories, and my tutor suggested the debate between Mencius and Xunzi as a classical example. I understand Mencius said human nature is good and Xunzi said it is bad, but I've read that this is…
Started by Elif Yıldız2 replies -
‘Existence precedes essence’ is an empirical claim, and the evidence is against it
I want to argue that existentialism's founding premise is not a metaphysical axiom but an empirical claim, and a shaky one. In his 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre puts it plainly: for human beings, existence precedes essence. There is no…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
Political meritocracy is better than electoral democracy
I'll argue this to test it, not because I hold it. Daniel Bell's The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (2015) draws on Confucian ideas to argue that political leaders should be selected and promoted on the basis of…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Reading group: the Analects, Books 1–4
After a year with Kant I want to read an ethics built on something other than rules. The Analects (Lunyu) were compiled by Confucius's disciples and their students after his death, and they read more like a notebook of conversations than a…
Started by Henrike Vogel4 replies -
Mozi was a consequentialist two thousand years before Bentham, and lost the argument the same way
I read the later Mohist canons closely, so I live with this comparison. Here's the case. Mozi, writing in the fifth century BCE, argued that the test of any doctrine or policy is whether it promotes benefit and removes harm for the…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Langar, the Shabbat table and Confucius’s sauce: what does eating together do?
The langar, where I help out at our gurdwara in Surrey, goes back to Guru Nanak and was made central by the gurus who followed: a free kitchen where everyone, whatever their caste, faith or status, sits on the floor in the…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal6 replies -
Teaching ethics to fifteen-year-olds: do I water sprouts or straighten warped wood?
Our school is arguing about a new behaviour policy, and I realised the argument is the old one between Mencius and Xunzi. Mencius says anyone who sees a child about to fall into a well feels alarm and compassion, before any calculation.…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
One night at the delivery bed, tested against five traditions’ answers to what makes an act right
Three weeks ago a mother I was sitting with delivered a baby who was clearly unwell. The doctor had been called and was twenty minutes away. The mother, exhausted, held my hand and asked: “Is my baby all right?” I did not…
Started by Farhana Akter5 replies -
When sovereignty belongs to God, are rulers more limited or less?
Hebrew and Arabic, the two languages I work between, carry traditions that both, at various points, said that sovereignty ultimately belongs to God. I've noticed that the same premise has been used to reach opposite conclusions. In 1 Samuel 8 the people…
Started by Tal Rosen5 replies -
Neither filling nor drawing out: what the Analects and Xunzi think a learner is
My students in Taipei memorise the Analects for exams, which means they experience Confucian learning as the most extreme form of filling-up imaginable. I keep trying to show them that the texts themselves say something else. The Analects opens with learning and…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Where do Ubuntu and Confucian role ethics fit, if they are neither utilitarian, Kantian nor virtue ethics?
I teach capoeira Angola in Salvador, and I am new to academic ethics. In a free course online, the lecturer said there are three main moral theories: consequences, duties and virtues. Then, in a footnote, she said Ubuntu and Confucian ethics “don't…
Started by Jorge Bonfim4 replies -
At my office “Confucian values” means obey the boss. Where did the reciprocity go?
I translate for a publishing house in Hanoi. When managers here want staff to stay late without complaint, they speak of Confucian values: respect for seniors, loyalty, harmony. We have a common saying about honouring teachers and respecting the Way. I grew…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo4 replies -
On the Confucian view there is no self behind your roles, and that is a strength
My students meet Confucius as a list of duties to memorise. I want them to meet the boldest reading of him instead, and I'd like to test it here first. The reading, associated especially with Henry Rosemont and Roger Ames, goes like…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
In the five Confucian relationships, friendship is the odd one out. Why is it there?
My students memorise Mencius's list of the five relationships for exams: affection between father and son, rightness between ruler and minister, distinction between husband and wife, proper order between elder and younger, and trust (xin) between friends. They memorise it and never…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Watsuji’s betweenness, Akan personhood and Confucian roles: is the relation more basic than the person?
When I retired after forty years designing bridges, I was surprised by how much of “me” went with the job. I did not lose a role; I seemed to lose a person. A friend at the temple handed me Watsuji's Ethics and…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
If virtue ethics says ‘do what the virtuous person would do’, how does a beginner use that?
Reading Aristotle slowly, with a pencil, I have hit something that bothers me. I suspect it is a beginner's worry, so forgive me. The summaries I have read say virtue ethics tells you to act as a virtuous person would act in…
Started by Gerrit Venter5 replies -
Why do some translators refuse to render ren as ‘benevolence’?
This question came to me through my work. A French colleague asked me why English translations of the Analects disagree so much about the word 仁, ren: Legge often has "perfect virtue", D. C. Lau "benevolence", Waley and Slingerland "Goodness", others "humaneness",…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
Dai Zhen was right: moral principle used to crush desire is itself a cruelty
My students memorise Zhu Xi for their exams, and one slogan of the Cheng–Zhu school always sticks: preserve heavenly principle, eliminate human desires. They write it down without blinking. Dai Zhen (1724–1777) blinked. A Qing scholar trained in the philological methods of…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Reading group: Sima Qian’s postface and his letter to Ren An
My students meet Sima Qian as a name in a list of Han dynasty achievements. I would like to read him properly, as someone who thought hard about what a historian is for. The plan, three weeks: Week 1. The postface to…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
What is music for? Xunzi, Plato and my parish choir
I play the organ at a parish church in Kraków and teach music theory at a secondary school. Every Sunday I see music do something to a congregation that a sermon can't, and I want to know what philosophers have thought that…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies -
“The best ruler is barely noticed” is compatible with abandonment, and the Legalists exploited exactly that
Chapter 17 of the Daodejing ranks rulers. The best are those whose people barely know they exist. Next come those the people love and praise; then those they fear; then those they despise. And when the work is done, the people all…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies -
Can technomoral virtues be cultivated the way Confucian ones are, or is the borrowing too loose?
My students spend most of their waking lives on their phones, so Shannon Vallor's Technology and the Virtues (2016) caught my attention. She argues that rules and impact assessments cannot keep up with technologies that change every year, and that what we…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Mencius’s child at the well, seen from a delivery room in Sylhet
I have worked on a maternity ward for nineteen years. Last month a friend lent me a translation of Mencius, and I stopped at the passage about the child at the well and read it three times. Mencius says that anyone who…
Started by Farhana Akter5 replies -
Did classical Chinese philosophers have a concept of truth, or only of the “admissible”?
This question sits at the centre of my reading of the Later Mohist canons, and I would welcome other views. In 1985 Chad Hansen published an influential paper arguing, roughly, that classical Chinese philosophy did not use a semantic concept of truth,…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies -
Confucian ethics is a role ethics, and filing it under virtue ethics hides its best idea
In the national ethics curriculum I teach in Seoul, Confucius sits on the same page as Aristotle under the heading "virtue ethics". I used to accept that. I now think it is a mistake, or at least a costly simplification. Here is…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu6 replies