Confucius in 60 Minutes E-Book

Walther Ziegler

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 99

Beschreibung

Confucius (551 - 479 BC) is not only the most influential East Asian philosopher. His name is known around the world. Already 2500 years ago he posed the decisive question that still concerns us today: how do I find the "Dao", the right way in life? Whenever anyone begins a sentence with the words "Confucius says", people pay attention, expecting some timeless truth. But in fact his key idea is astonishingly up-to-the-minute. People, says Confucius, are naturally all equal. Therefore everyone, rich or poor, should have free access to culture and the chance to find his own "Dao". But how do I find my own way? Confucius's answer at first sounds simple. We must train our character, develop our best qualities, but at the same time always bear in mind other people's self-development. "What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others," says Confucius. To live out co-humanity, or "ren", is for him the highest good. He knows, however, that we are not all saints. Thus, he remarks self-critically: "Conscientiously to perform all duties and not to be overcome by wine. What one of these things do I attain to?" All of us make mistakes while searching for the "Dao". We injure others, do not always tell the truth, or make bad decisions. The important thing is to learn from such mistakes. "To make a mistake and yet to not change your ways - this is what is called truly making a mistake." Confucius's thoughts also involve much wit and irony. The book "Confucius in 60 Minutes" Confucius's key idea and the fascinating lightness of his personality are presented using over 100 of his best quotes. The book is published worldwide as part of the popular series "Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes", now translated into 6 languages.

Leseprobe

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

Contents

Confucius’s Great Discovery

Confucius’s Central Idea

The Secret of Harmony: “Xiao” and “Li” – Respect, Rites and Rituals

Exemplary Thinking and Acting: The Five Virtues of the “Junzi”, or the True “Gentleman”

“In Education There Are No Differences in Kind”. Everything Presupposes Education But Education is Not Everything.

Bringing “Ren”, or “True Humanity”, into Being

Find Your “Dao”, Your “Right Way”! The Confucian Philosophy of Self-Cultivation

Of What Use Is Confucius’s Discovery for Us Today?

A Backward-Looking Teaching or a Timeless Truth? Confucius’s Long Way

The Miracle of the Axial Age: The Reordering of the World by Confucius, Buddha and Socrates

Acquire Lightness with the Master: Self-Critique, Wit and Irony

Opposing is a Form of Esteeming

Confucius’s Legacy – the Lifelong Search for the Dao

Bibliographical References

Confucius’s Great Discovery

Confucius (551 – 479 BC) is without doubt the most important of all Chinese philosophers. The name “Confucius” was, in fact, originally an attempt by Latin-speaking Jesuit missionaries, who first translated Confucius’s works in 1687, to reproduce the Chinese Kong Fuzi, meaning “Master Kong”.2 This latinized form of the name has persisted in the West right up to the present day.

In the years after his death, Confucius’s ideas and his doctrine spread first throughout many countries in Asia and later throughout the entire world. Wherever anyone begins a sentence with the words “Confucius says…” the listener is bound to prick up his ears in expectation of hearing some timelessly valid truth about life on which they can model their own behaviour.

And Confucius’s thoughts, in fact, remain still today of astonishing contemporary relevance and psychological acuity. Confucius is not just a philosopher but a brilliant psychologist who knows every side of human beings, possessing an unerring eye for our human weaknesses, strengths and potentialities. This perhaps explains how his teachings have been able to survive and persist through two and a half mil-lennia of stormy, convoluted history. Still today, the stamp of Confucius’s ideas is plainly visible in the educations, and indeed in the later life-orientations, of billions of human beings not just in China but in Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea, Taiwan and large parts of the Philippines. After the first translations of his works into European languages were made, by Jesuit missionaries, in the course of the 17th century, he began to gain growing attention and respect also in the Western world. The great 18th-century French philosopher, Voltaire, praised him as the first great rationalist and proponent of “Enlightenment”. Today, the main work bearing Confucius’s name, the famous Analects, exists in more than a hundred different translations. The Analects, however, are a compilation by the great sage’s pupils and disciples. Like Socrates, Confucius himself left us no written works. The Greek-derived word chosen, then, for the standard English translation signifies, appropriately, “selections”: short sayings and recounted deeds of the Master assembled into a book after his death. Confucius’s “masterpiece”, then, is not a systematic work of the sort we know from many of the other great philosophers but rather simply a collection of the views and opinions of Confucius expressed regarding various subjects and themes.3

These various dialogues and conversations with pupils contain, however, as Confucius himself insists, a clearly recognizable central idea around which everything turns:

What is more, this central idea has something radically new about it. For Confucius, all human beings are, by their very nature, equal. In contradiction to what had been the case in China for thousands of years before him, differences in social class and social origin play no role at all in Confucius’s philosophy. Every human being, whether aristocrat or peasant, rich or poor, is capable of finding his “dao”, that is to say, the “right way” for him. Every one of us, Confucius teaches, is in principle able, through a process of character-training, education and self-cultivation, to become a “junzi” – or a “gentleman” in Confucius’s special sense of this term.

Thanks to these ideas Confucius counts as one of the great thinkers of what has been called the “Axial Age”: the age in which, separately but simultaneously on the world’s different continents, mankind set off in radically new directions, just as if human thought, after millennia of stasis and “walking on the spot”, had suddenly turned on its own axis and passed from darkness out into light.

Thus, Confucius’s lifetime coincides almost exactly with that of the Buddha on the Indian sub-continent and that of the Greek philosopher Socrates in distant Europe. Moreover, just like these two other thinkers he gives to humanity, in a period of moral decline and of wars, an entirely new political and ethical orientation, the effects of which have stretched far beyond his lifetime. Like the Buddha and Socrates, Confucius went in search of a timeless truth which would be valid even for future generations. It is not enough, he says, simply to understand one’s own time:

If Confucius’s ideas have enjoyed such wide resonance, this is surely owed to his simple but brilliant core idea: the search for the “dao”, which is also a search for a threefold harmony: harmony between the individual and his family; harmony between oneself and society; and inner harmony between oneself and one’s principles, that is to say, between our real life and our ideal image.

What Confucius was aiming at here was not, however, as one might at first glance assume, the achievement of a total conformity of the individual to his family, his social environment or the state. Nor does he aim at the eventual achievement of a total equality between all individuals or a perfect coincidence between our lives and our ideal images of how human life should be. On the contrary, the striving for harmony means, for Confucius, something fundamentally distinct from the striving to conform or agree:

“Harmony” in Confucius is a rich and shifting concept that is difficult to grasp. But it is only once we have grasped it that we become really able to understand the key idea behind his philosophy. When he speaks of “harmony” Confucius is not using the term in its colloquial sense and referring to a relaxed state without tensions. On the contrary, he is referring to a tireless, lifelong striving. “Harmony”, for him, is nothing other than a persistent striving for a co-humanity that would be worthy of its name. When Confucius was asked by one of his pupils whether there was “one word that could serve as a guide for one’s entire life”, he replied:

Going on to elucidate the Chinese word “shu” that is rendered here as “understanding”, he reveals that it is in fact a matter of that basic moral principle, recurring in so many forms in so many cultures, which is called “the golden rule”8 and which runs:

But just this “understanding”, construed in just this sense, is far from being something obvious and self-evident. On the contrary. Putting oneself in a position such that one feels what others feel is the hardest thing in the world. Not a single one of us, Confucius argues, ever really succeeds in taking the needs of others into account in just the way we take our own. Normally, we place our own interests high above the wellbeing of others, so that injuries to this wellbeing often occur in daily life.

It is only the “junzi”, the true “gentleman” in Confucius’s sense, who succeeds in living his own life without impairing the lives of others. This “gentleman”, indeed, even consciously promotes the development of the other people around him. In principle, Confucius believes, any human being can rise, through training of his character and self-cultivation, to become such a “gentleman”. He concedes, however, that it is an extremely difficult thing to feel, think and act, in every situation, as a “junzi”. He himself, he admits, has not always been up to the task, since it demands the exercise of three virtues at the same time:

Confucius surely deserves respect for admitting that even he, the great philosopher and teacher, “had not yet been able to achieve” all three aspects of this threefold virtue, that is, to be at once understanding, wise and courageous. The key moral appeal that he makes, however, is the appeal never to leave off trying to be all these things. The great task, argues Confucius, is that of bringing the two forces of egoism and understanding for others, which so easily drift apart from one another, into harmony. Because it is only if we succeed in doing this that we have a chance of a fulfilled life. True happiness, Confucius argues, requires the development of “ren”, or “humanity”:

This key philosophical idea, the resolute search for harmony via understanding and humanity, may on first consideration appear to be something bland and obvious. But considered more closely, what Confucius has seized on here is an extremely vital and controversial topic. Harmony is in fact nothing that can be considered self-evident. On the contrary, it is always the exception. We all know how conflictual family relationships can be; we have all become enraged about the state, our own powerlessness in the face of it, and the whims of bureaucratic authorities; and we all know the painful feeling of failing to realize one’s own wishes and potentialities. How, though, are we to deal with our own dissatisfaction? Is it possible for us ever to attain the “threefold harmony”?

Confucius expresses the eternal fundamental conflict of human existence which each of us knows only too well from his or her own life: we are all born with needs, wishes and drives; but we are not alone in the world; our needs and wishes tend to clash with those of other human beings and cannot always be brought to reconciliation with them.

There is competition and struggle over scarce goods, attention, fame, recognition, affection and love. Feelings of envy, vanity or deeply-felt personal injury are as old as mankind itself. Confucius was the first to dare to throw some light on this field of tensions and to pose the all-decisive question: how can I develop myself, and bring my own wishes and ideas to realization, without thereby limiting or harming others? How can I follow the laws and customs of my community and my state without thereby denying my own self? In which situations must I insist on the expression and development of my own values and in which must I draw back and let other values prevail? When must I faithfully support my friends, family and government and when I must speak out against them and resist them?

It is precisely because Confucius poses questions which affect us all in our daily lives that his teachings are so helpful and practical. The practical applicability and psychological acuity of his ideas are also perhaps due to his own personal history and experiences. Confucius knew life both from the perspective of the poor man without resources and from that of the rich and powerful. He lost his father already at the age of three and saw his family sink into poverty. Almost an orphan, he grew up in very straitened circumstances: