Reference: Confucianism
Reference: The World’s Religions by Huston Smith
[NOTE: In color are Vinaire’s comments.]
The purpose of the Confucian project is becoming a chun tzu, a fully realized human being. The heart-mind expands in concentric circles that begin with oneself and spread from there to include successively one’s family, one’s face-to-face community, one’s nation, and finally all humanity.
Let us assume that the deliberate tradition Confucius sought to fashion was in place. How would life appear to a Chinese, set within it?
It would beckon as a never-ending project of self-cultivation toward the end of becoming more fully human. The good man or woman in the Confucian scheme is the one who is always trying to become better.
The good man or woman in the Confucian scheme is the one who is always trying to become better.
The project is not attempted in a vacuum—this is not yogis retiring to mountain caves to discover the God within. Quite the contrary; a Confucian who is bent on self-cultivation positions himself or herself squarely in the center of ever-shifting, never-ending cross-currents of human relationships and would not wish things otherwise; saintliness in isolation had no meaning for Confucius. The point is not merely that human relationships are fulfilling; the Confucian claim runs deeper than that. It is rather that apart from human relationships there is no self. The self is a center of relationships. It is constructed through its interactions with others and is defined by the sum of its social roles.
The Confucian claim is rather that the self is a center of relationships. It is constructed through its interactions with others and is defined by the sum of its social roles.
This notion of the self is so different from Western individualism that we need to circle it for a paragraph. Confucius saw the human self as a node, not an entity; it is a meeting place where lives converge. In this it resembles a sea anemone, which is little more than a net through which tides and currents wash, leaving deposits that build what little substance the plant itself possesses. But though it is accurate in ways, this image is too passive; we do better to switch from sea currents to air currents that assail an eagle in flight. Those currents assault the eagle, but the eagle uses them to control its altitude by adjusting the tilt of its wings. Like an eagle in flight, our human life too is in motion, but in its case human relationships are the atmosphere through which it plows. The Confucian project is to master the art of adjusting one’s wings in order to ascend toward the elusive but approachable goal of human perfection. Or as Confucius would have said, toward the goal of becoming more completely human.
Confucius saw the human self as a node, not an entity; it is a meeting place where lives converge.
In this analogy Confucius’ Five Constant Relationships present themselves as relatively stable currents in atmospheric conditions that in other respects can fluctuate wildly. We have seen that all five relationships are asymmetrical in that behavior that is appropriate to one person in each pair is not identical with what is appropriate for the other person. This asymmetry presupposes role differentiation and details its specifics.
The crucial question here is whether the specifics Confucius proposed tilt the relationships, positioning one person in each pair above the other person. In one sense they definitely do. It seemed altogether natural to Confucius that children should look up to their parents, wives to husbands, subjects to rulers, and younger friends and siblings to their older counterparts, for the latter, generally older, are more experienced and provide natural role models. But this is where wingslants must be adjusted precisely, for a hair’s-breadth difference puts the Confucian project into a nose dive. The danger is greatest for the “top” partner in each pair, who could be tempted to assume that the position carries built-in perquisites rather than ones that must be merited. Unquestionably, human nature being what it is, the Chinese succumbed to this temptation—to what extent defies calculation, but enough to make this the sinister side of the Confucian scheme. But Confucius himself tried to forestall abuse by insisting that authority—due authority—is not automatic; it must be earned. The loyalty that is due the husband from the wife is contingent on the husband’s being the kind of husband who warrants—instinctively inspires—such loyalty, and comparably with the other four relationships, although the nuances of loyalty differ in each case. In the ruler-subject relationship, for example, the ruler retains the Mandate of Heaven—his right to his subjects’ loyalty—only insofar as their welfare is in truth his chief concern and he possesses the talents needed to promote it. More than two thousand years before the Magna Carta and the Rights of Man, two millennia before the West separated divine right from the office of kingship, the Chinese (through Confucius and his disciples) built the Right of Revolution solidly into their political philosophy: “Heaven sees as the people see; Heaven wills as the people will.” Far from being enjoined, complicity in the face of unwarranted authority is, in the Confucian project, a human failing.
It seemed altogether natural to Confucius that children should look up to their parents, wives to husbands, subjects to rulers, and younger friends and siblings to their older counterparts, for the latter, generally older, are more experienced and provide natural role models. But Confucius himself tried to forestall abuse by insisting that authority—due authority—is not automatic; it must be earned.
As a metaphor for the Confucian project, we introduced the image of an eagle adjusting its wings to maneuver the atmosphere—analogue for the Five Constant Relationships—in ways that enable it to ascend. If we round off this metaphor by asking what ascent means here, we find that the answer was begun in the preceding section. It means becoming a chun tzu, a fully realized human being, through expanding one’s sympathy and empathy indefinitely. The Chinese character for this empathy/sympathy is hsin. Pictorially, hsin is a stylized drawing of the human heart, but in meaning it denotes both mind and heart, for in Confucian learning the two go together—sundered from each other, thought runs dry, feeling is rudderless, and the Confucian project gets grounded. As for the increase of this heart-mind that is hsin, it expands in concentric circles that begin with oneself and spread from there to include successively one’s family, one’s face-to-face community, one’s nation, and finally all humanity. In shifting the center of one’s empathic concern from oneself to one’s family one transcends selfishness. The move from family to community transcends nepotism. The move from community to nation overcomes parochialism, and the move to all humanity counters chauvinistic nationalism.
The purpose of the Confucian project is becoming a chun tzu, a fully realized human being. The heart-mind expands in concentric circles that begin with oneself and spread from there to include successively one’s family, one’s face-to-face community, one’s nation, and finally all humanity.
This broadening process is accompanied by one that is deepening; for when it was suggested above that Confucius saw the self as the sum of its social roles, that overstates the case if it suggests that he denied that the self has an internal, subjective center. His repeated calls to self-examination and introspection generally show that he not only recognized an interior side to the self but considered it important. Confucian learning pivots on the self and is for the sake of the self, though (to be sure) as the self expands, its separation from others attenuates. Interior life grows richer as empathy increases, for it is the breadth and depth of one’s hsin that shapes the contours of subjectivity and provides it with its primary food for thought.
Confucius recognized that as the self expands externally, it also deepens internally toward a subjective center.
So inside and outside work together in the Confucian scheme. The inner world deepens and grows more satisfying and refined as jen and hsin expand and the possibilities of li are progressively realized. The project is never attempted alone. It proceeds in the sea of humanity, alongside others who likewise (with varying degrees of seriousness) are trying to become fully human. Always the practice field is the Five Constant Relationships. In the course of one’s training, one finds that mastering a role in one of the five sheds light on the other roles. To improve as a parent throws light on what being a good child (of one’s own parents) entails. The nuances of the other roles likewise illuminate one another.
The Confucian project proceeds in the sea of humanity, alongside others who likewise (with varying degrees of seriousness) are trying to become fully human.
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