What was confucius concerned with

The fourth virtue, wisdom, is related to appraising people and situations. In the Analects, wisdom allows a gentleman to discern crooked and straight behavior in others One well-known passage often cited to imply Confucius is agnostic about the world of the spirits is more literally about how wisdom allows an outsider to present himself in a way appropriate to the people on whose behalf he is working:.

The context for this sort of appraisal is usually official service, and wisdom is often attributed to valued ministers or advisors to sage rulers. In certain dialogues, wisdom also connotes a moral discernment that allows the gentleman to be confident of the appropriateness of good actions. In soliloquies about several virtues, Confucius describes a wise person as never confused 9. While comparative philosophers have noted that Chinese thought has nothing clearly analogous to the role of the will in pre-modern European philosophy, the moral discernment that is part of wisdom does provide actors with confidence that the moral actions they have taken are correct.

The virtue of trustworthiness qualifies a gentleman to give advice to a ruler, and a ruler or official to manage others. While trustworthiness may be rooted in the proper expression of friendship between those of the same status 1. The implication is that a sincerely public-minded official would be ineffective without the trust that this quality inspires. By the Han period, benevolence, righteousness, ritual propriety, wisdom and trustworthiness began to be considered as a complete set of human virtues, corresponding with other quintets of phenomena used to describe the natural world.

Some texts described a level of moral perfection, as with the sages of antiquity, as unifying all these virtues. Prior to this, it is unclear whether the possession of a particular virtue entailed having all the others, although benevolence was sometimes used as a more general term for a combination of one or more of the other virtues e.

At other times, Confucius presented individual virtues as expressions of goodness in particular domains of life. Early Confucius dialogues are embedded in concrete situations, and so resist attempts to distill them into more abstract principles of morality.

As a result, descriptions of the virtues are embedded in anecdotes about the exemplary individuals whose character traits the dialogues encourage their audience to develop. The five virtues described above are not the only ones of which Confucius spoke. Yet going through a list of all the virtues in the early sources is not sufficient to describe the entirety of the moral universe associated with Confucius.

Yet there is also a conundrum inherent in any attempt to derive abstract moral rules from the mostly dialogical form of the Analects , that is, the problem of whether the situational context and conversation partner is integral to evaluating the statements of Confucius.

Read as axiomatic moral imperatives, these passages differ from the kind of exemplar-based and situational conversations about morality usually found in the Analects.

For this reason, some scholars, including E. Bruce Brooks, believe these passages to be interpolations. While they are not wholly inconsistent with the way that benevolence is described in early texts, their interpretation as abstract principles has been influenced by their perceived similarity to the Biblical examples.

In the Records of Ritual , a slightly different formulation of a rule about self and others is presented as not universal in its scope, but rather as descriptive of how the exemplary ruler influences the people. In common with other early texts, the Analects describes how the moral transformation of society relies on the positive example of the ruler, comparing the influence of the gentleman on the people to the way the wind blows on the grass, forcing it to bend In a similar vein, after discussing how the personal qualities of rulers of the past determined whether or not their subjects could morally transform, the Records of Ritual expresses its principle of reflexivity:.

That is why the gentleman only seeks things in others that he or she personally possesses. These canonical texts argued that political success or failure is a function of moral quality, evidenced by actions such as proper ritual performance, on the part of the ruler.

Confucius drew on these classics and adapted the classical view of moral authority in important ways, connecting it to a normative picture of society. Positing a parallel between the nature of reciprocal responsibilities of individuals in different roles in two domains of social organization, in the Analects Confucius linked filial piety in the family to loyalty in the political realm:.

It is rare for a person who is filially pious to his parents and older siblings to be inclined to rebel against his superiors… Filial piety to parents and elder siblings may be considered the root of a person. Just as Confucius analyzed the psychology of ritual performance and related it to individual moral development, his discussion of filial piety was another example of the development and adaptation of a particular classical cultural pattern to a wider philosophical context and set of concerns.

This adaptation of filial piety to connote the proper way for a gentleman to behave both inside and outside the home was a generalization of a pattern of behavior that had once been specific to the family. As kinship groups were subordinated to larger political units, texts began to exhibit hybrid lists of ideal qualities that drew from both sets. He goes on to explain that a child has a dual set of duties, to both a father and ruler, the former filial piety and the other loyalty.

This sort of qualification suggests that as filial piety moved further outside its original family context, it had to be qualified to be integrated into a view that valorized multiple character traits. In my circle, being upright differs from this. A father would conceal such a thing on behalf of his son, and a son would conceal it on behalf of his father.

Uprightness is found in this. In this way, too, Confucius was adapting filial piety to a wider manifold of moral behaviors, honing his answer to the question of how a child balances responsibility to family and loyalty to the state. While these two traits may conflict with one and other, Sociologist Robert Bellah, in his study of Tokugawa and modern Japan, noted how the structural similarity between loyalty and filial piety led to their both being promoted by the state as interlinked ideals that located each person in dual networks of responsibility.

Confucius was making this claim when he connected filial piety to the propensity to be loyal to superiors 1. Of the classical sources from which Confucius drew, two were particularly influential in discussions of political legitimation. This King Wen of ours, his prudent heart was well-ordered. He shone in serving the High God, and thus enjoyed much good fortune. Unswerving in his virtue, he came to hold the domains all around.

The Classic of Documents is a collection that includes orations attributed to the sage rulers of the past and their ministers, and its arguments often concern moral authority with a focus on the methods and character of exemplary rulers of the past. When it comes to the mandate inherited from King Wen, the chapter insists that the mandate is not unchanging, and so as ruler the son must always be mindful of it when deciding how to act. Tyson Brown, National Geographic Society.

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If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media. Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service. Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives. Ancient China is responsible for a rich culture, still evident in modern China. From small farming communities rose dynasties such as the Zhou B.

E , Qin B. E , and Ming C. Each had its own contribution to the region. It is also what a Chinese sociologist called a "diffused religion"; 3 its institutions were not a separate church, but those of society, family, school, and state; its priests were not separate liturgical specialists, but parents, teachers, and officials.

Confucianism was part of the Chinese social fabric and way of life; to Confucians, everyday life was the arena of religion. The burning issue of the day was: If it is not the ancestral and nature spirits, what then is the basis of a stable, unified, and enduring social order? The dominant view of the day, espoused by Realists and Legalists, was that strict law and statecraft were the bases of sound policy. Confucius, however, believed that the basis lay in Zhou religion, in its rituals li.

He interpreted these not as sacrifices asking for the blessings of the gods, but as ceremonies performed by human agents and embodying the civilized and cultured patterns of behavior developed through generations of human wisdom.

They embodied, for him, the ethical core of Chinese society. Moreover, Confucius applied the term "ritual" to actions beyond the formal sacrifices and religious ceremonies to include social rituals: courtesies and accepted standards of behavior-- what we today call social mores.

He saw these time-honored and traditional rituals as the basis of human civilization, and he felt that only a civilized society could have a stable, unified, and enduring social order.

Thus one side of Confucianism was the affirmation of accepted values and norms of behavior in primary social institutions and basic human relationships. Starting from individual and family, people acting rightly could reform and perfect the society. The blueprint of this process was described in "The Great Learning," a section of the Classic of Rituals:. Only when things are investigated is knowledge extended; only when knowledge is extended are thoughts sincere; only when thoughts are sincere are minds rectified; only when minds are rectified are the characters of persons cultivated; only when character is cultivated are our families regulated; only when families are regulated are states well governed; only when states are well governed is there peace in the world.

Confucius' ethical vision ran against the grain of the legalistic mind set of his day. Only under the Han Emperor Wu r. From that time on the imperial state promoted Confucian values to maintain law, order, and the status quo. In late traditional China, emperors sought to establish village lectures on Confucian moral precepts and to give civic awards to filial sons and chaste wives.

The imperial family and other notables sponsored the publication of morality books that encouraged the practice of Confucian values: respect for parents,loyalty to government, and keeping to one's place in society—farmers should remain farmers, and practice the ethics of farming.

This was ideally accomplished not by legal regulation and coercion, but by personal rule, moral example, and mediation in disputes by the emperor and his officials.

Confucian political theory emphasized conflict resolution through mediation, rather than through the application of abstract rules to establish right and wrong in order to achieve social harmony. The belief that the state was the moral guardian of the people was reflected in a number of institutions. Most important among these was the merit bureaucracy , or civil service , in which all officials were to be selected for their moral qualities, qualities that would enable them not only to govern, but to set a moral example that would transform the people.

Because Confucianism was a moral system, the Confucian classics had to be mastered by prospective officials. Official position and examination degree, not wealth or business acumen, were universally recognized marks of status. A complementary philosophical strain in Chinese thought was Legalism, first applied in the short-lived dynasty of the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi Ch'in Shih Huang-ti, B. Proponents of Legalism stressed an administrative approach to efficient and pragmatic government; universal and codified law rather than morality in contrast to the Confucian emphasis ; and state power as an end in itself.

As first applied, Legalism proved too harsh and disruptive, but for two millennia thereafter the Chinese state combined aspects of the Legalist structure with the Confucian spirit, recognizing the effectiveness of a centralized, bureaucratic rule which could oversee massive public works, state monopolies, standardized weights, measures, and even script, attempt intellectual control, and enforce social order by suppressing revolt.